


Earth and stars

by Tivisa_Henako



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: M/M, Missing Scene, Oliver’s POV, Translation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-06-15
Packaged: 2019-05-10 03:23:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 53,420
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14729015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tivisa_Henako/pseuds/Tivisa_Henako
Summary: From interview André  Aciman:Q. In the book, because it’s all from Elio’s perspective, Oliver also remains an enigma.A. He still is to me. There are things that I’ve given and that I needed to have there in place, but I don’t know who he is. I’ve never been in his head.





	1. "Now" and "Later"

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [Земля и звёзды](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12921021) by [Tivisa_Henako](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tivisa_Henako/pseuds/Tivisa_Henako). 



> Any coin has two sides. Oliver's memories about the distant summer of 1983 and what happened later, written by Oliver himself.
> 
> Dedication: To André Aciman - heroes’ creator, Luca Guadagnino, Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer – those who brought them to life.
> 
> As the book and the movie differ considerably from each other, the author was inspired with the book. Everything added by the author does not deviate from it. The movie events are considered only if they don’t contradict the book. 
> 
> Warning!  
> Neither for the author of this work, nor for the translator, the English language is not native, so if you see any mistake, the author will be grateful for the message.
> 
> [Teaser Trailer ](https://youtu.be/vGlGQuPljaI)for this work.

In my mind I have been writing this letter for many years, but a simple thought has always kept me away from the writing desk: I wouldn’t have been able to finish it. My Wife will notice for sure that I’m writing something with a pen on paper, that is rather unusual for me, and children could pry into it by chance. And if I used the laptop… call me paranoid, but as there is a rising star in the world of ‘advanced programmers’ (that’s what he calls it) as well as cool hackers in my family – I mean my older nephew – I mistrust these devices something I really want to hide.

“People know next to nothing about what they use every day”, he said when I complained to him that I had erased the text of my future article by mistake. “Give me your laptop. There’s no erased information when a profi takes the matter into his hands”, and he instantly proved that to me in the most obvious way. 

By the way, I guess I should apologize to Elio, because I was not honest with him – or rather, I was not fully honest with him. I said that I was going from Rome to Mentona but did not specify precisely when I had to arrive there, however he never asked. I’m supposed to stay for one night only; I’m spending it in the same room I did in 1983. Little has changed here since then. Now there is a writing table by the window (I write sitting at that very table now); instead of the memorable night lamp Elio has brought from Oxford, there is a thin-legged lamp with the Tiffany shade sitting comfortably on the bedside table; posters from the walls have disappeared somewhere, and more photos have been added instead of beautiful places, views of cities familiar and not and a large Professor’s portrait.  
It looks like a photo near the portrait has been removed – there is a rectangular spot on the wallpaper distempered with the ivory cream that is a bit brighter. And it does not belong to the postcard I took away twenty years ago… And if you go out onto the balcony, the same old view will appear before your eyes: a large bay with capes vanishing in the mist, parts of the quaintly indented coastline, cozy sandy coves. 

Today I have already walked along the seafront stretching from the very B., and the year when I used to see it every day is coming to life in front of me. It comes back to me; that was life, the rest is but a dream. The sea licks dark boulders covered in seaweed and seashells; the fields painted in all shades of grassy, from the bright green of sunflowers to seemingly frosty color of crooked olive trees, run up the slopes to the hills. Yellow petals of sunflowers and lilac-blue lavender flowers add diversity to this green sea.

I have probably spent too much time for these descriptions, but this is what anyone would have done, speaking of the place that has become dear to him due to its cherished memories. 

I wish I were consistent and exact narrating of the distant summer of 1983, but I’m afraid it won’t work. My reminiscence of those six weeks is like a flip-flop calendar with notes on its pages I made along the way. Some days are remembered only via their spirits; while others I remember almost to the last minute. There were both a few key scenes, and, otherwise, there were the "repeat" moments. The morning ritual before and after breakfast: I lying on the grass, or by the pool, Elio sitting at my table. Then the swim or the jog. Then I grabbing a bicycle and riding to see the translator in town. Lunch at the large, shaded dining table in the other garden, or lunch indoors, always a guest or two for _lunch drudgery_. The siesta, splendid idleness, and lush with abundant sun and silence.

For reason I might mention later I always chose carefully the place where I planned to spend my vacation or holidays. So, I decided in favor of Professor Perlman after considering everything thoughtfully and getting certain that there were neither our relatives, family friends nor father’s customers in Professor’s milieu, in the nearest town or among his neighbours. Although I declined to take over our family’s investment company, my father did not lose hope and often introduced me to those he dealt with. I did not mind while watching over my interests. I don’t know another family where rumors would spread so fast. 

I knew that the professor had a seventeen-year-old son, but thought nothing of it. After all, seven years difference was a big gap in our age. I did not ponder much of him, but subtly I was expecting to see a shy teen obsessed with how to get rid of acne and the Problem of the First Coitus, and hoped I wouldn’t have to share my own experience in these fields with him. Moreover, there could be more than one First Coitus, as in my case, while fate kept me from acne. Now I’m smiling, recalling those thoughts.

I remember the first time we met well. How did Elio seem to me? Woven of many contradictions. He was shorter than me with curly dark hair and rather inspired features, thin hands and legs, heart-shaped face, clear contour of bright lips the color of a pulp of ripe fig. If he was a girl, she wouldn’t even need a lipstick. Still the glance of strangely light hazelnut eyes with a rare (for males) green shade appeared to be surprisingly clever and peering, and his handshake was strong. There was something… androgynous about him. It was like Elio hadn’t yet decided who to become – he could be imagined as Apollo with a kithara in his hands or as a formidable Artemis with a bow and arrows. That alone should have alerted me, but I misunderstood the hint, just like I did not understand much more until a certain moment. 

He was boyishly awkward and impulsive, a bit naive and a bit vulnerable, and timid. Also proud, I noted, when he unexpectedly pulled his hand out of mine, as if he burnt himself. “What else would he be?” I thought, noting restraint of completely non-Italian manners of his father and a calm grace of his mother. 

At twenty-four, as I understand now, I was notable for jolly arrogance and seriously considered myself to be a guru in knowing people. I liked watching and studying them. I liked to unravel the motives of their actions. Hasty generalizations are typical for young people, and they often come to a conclusion that they have known and understood everything simply because they have learned some particular things. This made it even funnier how quickly my impression of Elio was changing. I barely managed to decide that I had found him out fully, but soon he ruined my conclusions completely. Was he a teenager? This very teenager knew something I, as it turned out, had no idea about! Timid? You don't say! Proud he was, for sure, but was he timid? I could not fail more. Was he naïve? Was he vulnerable? Here I was partly right, but, frankly speaking, by his age some extraordinary circumstances crushed my naivety and I had already learned to conceal my vulnerability. 

So, we had lunch with him sitting by my side, and had an ordinary small-talk: where I had already been, what I had already seen, if I had found an interpreter. Elio would show you his room that would become yours for the time… At these words I looked at him – I had not been told that my appearance would force someone to give up something, even for some time. I wouldn’t have liked it, but Elio just shrugged and I got that he was used to it. I wasn’t the first, I wouldn’t be the last. As a rule he spoke very little at the table, but emptied his plate quickly. I smiled seeing this healthy appetite in someone growing by the hour. Meanwhile, the conversation went on and on. You know, there was an abandoned narrow-gauge railway and old train cars bearing the insignia of the royal House of Savoy, they were older than us, did you want Elio to walk you there? I looked at him doubtfully once again, and asked myself what he might think of playing a cicerone’s part. And suddenly something flashed in his bright eyes, as if a sunbeam broke in the drops of water. 

“Sure! Let’s go after lunch.”

Suddenly and completely charmed, I agreed. As it turned out later, I did not take the burning sun into consideration, but there was nowhere to retreat. After all, how could I show less endurance than a teenager!

After lunch I followed him up a two-span wooden staircase to the second floor. From a short corridor to the right, into which the doors of two rooms led, Elio led me into a large light-filled room where my suitcase was already standing. Shutters were not closed, and the French window stood wide open. A gentle breeze swayed tulle curtains, the rings attaching them to the cornice tinkled gently. Like nothing on earth iodine smell blended with heavy aroma of heated earth and a slight coniferous shade. I remember breathing in this enchanting cocktail and thinking what delight it was to drink as much of it as you wanted, although such a bliss could not last for the whole year. Nonetheless a small town of New England where I grew up could not, just like New York, brag about anything except for the smell of dust and car exhausts, and the green-gray Atlantic was nothing like the deep blue of the Mediterranean. And the sun! There is no such sun in New England. Blinding, scorching, and filling you up to the very fingertips. It was reflected from all the white surfaces, cut them with colored rays, drowned you in its radiance… 

While I was standing there, either dreaming or anticipating something, Elio walked past me onto the balcony, slightly touching me with his shoulder. 

“Here’s the second exit, leads straight to the pool. And there,” he waved his hand invitingly, “is the path to the beach and to the road to B. I often take a shortcut here when I come back late.”

The tone of his voice pulled me out of my dreams. Elio was standing on the balcony with his back pressed against the railing, and some very significant smile was dancing on his lips. I went out to him and understood immediately what he was hinting at. We looked at each other knowingly. 

“So what are you going to do now?” I asked. He smiled wider and pointed at the second French window leading to the same balcony.

“The same.” 

Therefore, his room was next door to mine. Something nice and hot fluttered in my chest, but without letting the heat go up, I walked past that closed window to the staircase.

“Someone promised me a tour of the roundabouts!”

Elio ran after me stomping on the steps and rattling the banister mercilessly. Brat. A boy of a breed completely different from the one I was used to. Moreover, he had no acne, just rare birthmarks on the smooth sun-kissed skin. I liked what I saw, and I wanted to see more.

We walked shoulder to shoulder, trying to stay in the shade of trees, and the incessant crackling of cicadas was choking the quiet rustle of fallen pine needles under soles of our sneakers. He was mostly silent, only occasionally glancing at me sideways from behind his sunglasses. I saw it, although pretended I did not. He was clearly waiting for me to ask something. And I did, after looking right and left at the sight of the rusty rails.

“There is a train station too?” I asked. 

This simple question led to a ten-minute lecture on local history. The charm was gone, as if it had never been; I wished I had been right about his timidity. “He can become insolent”, I told myself and subconsciously pulled away from him. I had enough insolence and control in my own family. While studying in New York, I felt the invisible custody and gritted my teeth waiting for some holidays. Only where no rumors could come from I had freedom, although even here, in Italy, they regularly tried to control me. 

Elio once asked me when I realized that he liked me, and I answered that I knew about a week after we had fun toying with Leopardi’s poems. But he never asked when I was drawn to him. And that minute was etched in my memory so clearly that there would be no “about”. 

I liked him from the very first day.

We rode to B. on bicycles, as I had to open an account in the bank, and we stopped by some bar on our way there. We were hoping to have a rest and refresh ourselves, but we had to go with buying a bottle of water, which furthermore was unpleasantly warm. Elio unscrewed the cap in a wink and greedily swallowed a mouthful.

“Want some?” He handed me the bottle. I took a sip and gave the bottle back to him, and he drank again. It was as if we shared a secret kiss, a thought flashed. ”It is hot”, Elio added, as if he hadn’t noticed my bewilderment, or maybe he hadn’t actually noted anything weird. He took off his sunglasses, poured water into his cupped hand, splashed it in his face, on the forehead, squinting like a kitten, and then combed his wet hair back with his hand. Then he looked up at me.

The second heat attack in the pit of my stomach I could not confuse with anything else. It was something more than just affection. 

Don’t think that it was _сoup de foudre_ , no, nothing like that. Just a completely relatable understanding of physical attractiveness, a simple ‘what if’ thought. I can’t say I never had anything like that, I was used to dealing with unwelcomed desires. There are a lot of ways to fend them off - you can find common ground and turn everything into friendship, or take the opposite way, step back. Then you literally increase the distance between us, do not watch, do not smell, and do not fall for the tempting aura. Or you can remember that there is a teenager in front of you, and remind yourself of the age difference. Tell yourself strictly that seducing your host's children, whatever their gender may be, is not the way to pay for their hospitality. 

These thoughts swept through my head faster than it took to put them on paper. I struggled to tear my eyes away from the wet curls and the throat on which the transparent drops were running down, took a quiet step back and concentrated on the feeling of warmish water that failed to quench my thirst. It helped, but Elio was still looking, his eyes sparkling with gold and green. 

“What did one do around here?”

It was an easy, friendly question. It could have been asked by a bagman or a tourist. And the answer was just as touristic. He shrugged his shoulders indifferently.

“Nothing. Waited for the summer to end.” 

“Well, maybe everyone is waiting, but what do you do?”

“Me? I like reading. Swimming or jogging in the morning. I also enjoy playing tennis if I manage to find a partner.” 

“You also walk at night…” 

Corners of his mouth twitched in the same meaningful grin. 

“Everyone walks at night here. And I have my music. I” he said pointedly “never get bored.” 

This is how pride manifested itself in him when he felt the condescending tone adults use to talk to children - by detachment. 

“What do you play?”

“Guitar, piano. A little violin.”

“I envy you” I did envy him actually. “Well, let’s move on?”

After I left the bank our conversation resumed suddenly.

“You don’t play anything at all?” Elio asked out of the blue. 

“They tried to teach me, but nothing came out of it. I took classes for a couple of years. Then I gave up.” I left aside the fact that music for my parents was a means to an end, not a goal, because their displeasure was fueled by the thought of wasted money. “I play a little guitar now, just for myself.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you give up?”

I mulled it over. How do I explain that on the scales when choosing between books and piano, between piano and guitar, freedom was a greater force than skill? And do I even have to be that frank? I avoided a direct answer. 

“Music shall be taken seriously or not at all, it seems to me. Isn’t it so? By the way, where did one jog around here? 

I changed the subject for a purpose, as I didn’t like his look. It was as if he read something between the lines that I didn’t want to say.

“Along the promenade, mostly. I could show you if you want.” 

“Not now!” I thought and then added out loud: “Later, maybe”. 

Elio immediately took shelter behind solid dark shades. He kept silent, but I somehow knew that he was stung. 

We later appeared to know quite a lot about each other overall, God knows from what sources. It was as if we grew up on the same books, citing and catching unfinished quotes. Each of us used to guess what words the other would choose to play with. On the very first evening when Elio sat down at the piano and started playing, I froze: Gluck’s gentle “Melody” suited my mood like nothing else would…

I never believed in providence or intuition, I was far too reasonable for that. But I remembered that day six weeks later, sitting in a plane and picking in my treasury of impressions for the last time, I thought that the surprisingly generous Atropos showed me a page of the book of life, where she had already written down our destiny; we followed it later without knowing. We obeyed the pendulum that was swinging from attraction to affection through misunderstanding to cooling when the vague disquieting foreboding took over, advising me to keep my distance from Elio. Too dangerous, too unpredictable and just plain stupid, it warned me. I wish someone had warned me that the swings of this pendulum would grow wider day by day; it would sink lower and lower until it razed what I used to be to the ground. 

*****

That's how it went for some time. After discussing questions about my help for the professor, I inwardly sealed off Elio with a red line and let myself go with the flow and enjoy life. In the evenings people played poker, danced and spent time over a glass of wine or something stronger in B.; I had no doubt I only had to do the same, and shortly I would find friends, a girlfriend, or, as it would turn out sometimes, a boyfriend. I liked girls as well as boys, but I could date the former all year round, while the latter were for the time spent away from home. 

It soon appeared that I couldn’t have picked a better house and a better family. I realized soon enough that the relations between the Perlmans were totally opposite to the marriage between my parents. Openness, warmth and love instead of external coldness that always goes hand in hand with the lack of communication and true understanding. Who knows if mother and father ever loved each other, but not even once did I catch glimpse of any tenderness or hear them speak about anything other than family matters, - books, movies or some other interests that they possibly shared. 

The professor and the signora constantly dragged me into their conversations, but such details as where I was going or when I was to come back were of no interest to anyone, except for the sole purpose of setting the table. I walked around the whole villa, did whatever I wanted, came and left whenever I deemed necessary; and the other habitants of the house, constant and temporary, did the same. Friends and closer neighbors often came to visit late in the morning. Perlman’s house was the nearest one to the sea, and all you needed was to open the tiny gate by the balustrade, take the narrow stairway down the bluff, and you were on the rocks. Everyone would gather in the garden and then head out together to the beach below. And at lunch or dinner, I was regularly introduced to some people, young and old, who felt like one of the family at the table and turned out to be cousins, neighbors, aunts, colleagues of the professor dropping by on their way to somewhere, or even the tourists passing by. And all these people drank, ate, lounged around by the pool, played tennis in the evenings, spoke all kinds of languages (mostly Italian, with quite a dense admixture of English, French and German) and argued about everything in raised voices. Italians can't let things well enough alone, can't play down, must exclaim, proclaim, declaim… 

In Sicily, in the house of my friends where I had stayed before, their manners were more reserved, and there was no such mawkish atmosphere, but I got used to it quickly. It even started to amuse me, especially when I realized that the professor was agreeing with me and sincerely enjoying it. That was because of what Elio so aptly called the _dinner drudgery_ which was a kind of payment for the permissiveness. It was easier to handle if you shared this burden with someone. 

Three or four days after my arrival the professor’s colleague who came to visit him rose from the table earlier. I’ve already mentioned the ease of local customs. He approached the piano littered with notes. Out of politeness, perhaps, he leaned over to pick up the sheets lying on the floor. Elio jumped up immediately. 

“Don’t touch it!” he cried out.

The stunned man froze as he was, kneeling on his knee, and the cause of the turmoil stood mortified in the crossfire of everyone’s stares. 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know…”

“That’s nothing,” Elio interrupted him. “It’s just… you see, those are failed versions. Otherwise I will get confused.” 

“Transcription?” The guest looked through the sheets, put them back on the floor and got up. “Haydn’s ‘Seven Last Words of Christ’, well, well. Boldly. May I inquire what is wrong with the classical arrangement for the piano?” 

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Elio came closer. “But I wanted to rearrange it for four hands. And I changed the harmony a little, it would add depth and… formidableness, I guess.” He was becoming more and more inspired, seeing that everybody was listening to him very closely. “To make the darkness fall upon the city long before the curtain in the temple is torn apart before ‘Il terremoto’…” 

I watched him, amazed to the very depths of my being. The choice of the work and what he was aiming for… I have learned to think of him as a teenager, and before that moment that was how he generally behaved - like a youngster, whose opinion hardly concerned anyone in the discussion of serious professional subjects. I had never thought of asking him what he was doing next to me, at the table by the pool. When we gathered at the lunch, he was mostly silent. If he entered into a conversation, he talked in short phrases at the speed of light, muffling words self-consciously. This habit of his created the impression that he was always flustered, not wanting to embarrass himself and blurt out some nonsense. But now, talking about something that really interested him, something he was good at, his behavior changed beyond recognition. He was explaining his transcription; his eyes were shining, and his speech was flowing freely, even though he would think it over sometimes; by the face of the professor’s colleague I could tell that he was impressed just as greatly. 

“Boldly,” he said again. “May I take a look at the final result?”

“You can trust Signor Vicenzo,” professor interrupted; he was listening to the conversation, looking as if he couldn’t understand half of what his son was saying. “He’s an excellent musician.”

“You’re flattering me, Sammy. Anyway, my strong side is the cello, but I have my eye on two piano players. They often perform as a duo. Do you want me to talk to them?” 

Elio blushed slightly, and he nodded.

He could be just seventeen, but his mind and soul were clearly older. I felt a dim alarm; red line I had used to fence the enclosure of desire razed out right before my eyes. 

They say we tend to fall in love with those who are complete opposites of us in terms of appearance but resemble us in mind and character. I’m a perfect example of it, blond and dare I say, far from stupid. And though I had nothing against the momentary satisfaction of sexual desire, even if I didn’t bother to ask my partner’s name before all our clothes were gone, but intellectual brunettes of both sexes always attracted me like magnets. 

It should be noted that light hair and blue eyes are not actually typical for our family. My appearance did not come from my parents or even grandfathers. I’m as much a copy of my grandmother, my father’s mother, as a man can be a copy of a woman. I don’t quite remember her; she died before I turned five. Only blurred memories remain of the knees covered with a slippery dress, from which I was sliding down all the time, of the hands with long fingers holding me, of the golden locks smelling so deliciously that I tried to chew them, of her quiet laughter. I also know that she used to take a large oval medallion on a thick twisted chain with an insert of lapis lazuli, the celestial stone, and give it to me to play with, as I remember touching the intricate notch around the stone with my finger. She was a purebred Norwegian, an actress of theater and cinema. My grandfather has a lot of photographs in his album, where she is depicted in the roles Magda, Nora from the “Doll House”, Gedda Gabler and Edwarda in the screen adaptation of “Pan”. She was just like Edwarda in her real life, capable of long and strong love, but never completely dissolving in it, as being a Lutheran believer, she refused point blank to accept the faith of my grandfather even formally. Of all four children and nine grandchildren I was the only one who looked like her; this is why my grandfather called me Viking and nothing else, often took my side in conflicts with father and even hinted that my appearance was a direct way to acting, not science. Well, that’s just for the record. 

The premonition that was warning me against getting closer with Elio resurfaced with renewed vigor. It evoked fear in me, and this fear in its turn pushed me towards violence. I’m confessing that because I intend neither to spare myself nor lie. We almost didn't talk for next two days. He noticed my polite indifference and saw it as animosity so paid me back accordingly. He did not wait for me in shorts and trainers on our bedrooms' long balcony, or by the pool with a blanket hanging over his shoulder. I preferred swimming in the pool to the morning jogging, and after breakfast I worked in my room; if we met, we avoided each other to the maximum extent: nothing but “hello”, “good morning”, and “nice weather”. After the siesta I escaped to the city and spent one night playing poker, and the other for hot sex in a quiet place on the beach with some girl I picked up in a bar. 

This was probably what set the record straight and made me think logically. What was I afraid of? Well, Elio’s development was ahead of his age, but this can be considered an advantage if we would just become friends. I didn’t see any reasons for us not to. Everything else stayed the same. When I arrived, he was seventeen; when I leave, he will still be of the same age. Moreover, he is still the host’s son, and not remotely interested in me as a potential lover. “Excellent, just keep reminding yourself about it more often,” I told myself. The following morning I waited for Elio on the balcony. 

Elio jumped out of his room so quickly that he almost threw me over the railings. I had to grab him by his shoulders.

“Hey, don’t spend all this rush on me. Want to go for a run?” 

“No,” he wasn’t expecting that and even tried to free himself. “Not much”. 

“Well, let’s go to the sea and swim then.” 

I didn’t offer choice; I didn’t give him a chance to say no.

He was standing as close to me as never before. I could feel the heat of his body with my palms through the T-shirt, the smell coming from his hair (top of his head was right at the level of my nose), even see the hazy leftover dreams still floating in the depth of his pupils when he gazed at me. I saw him hesitating, unable to understand, not knowing what to think about my mood swings, but I smiled, and he smiled back.

“I need a towel.”

And everything became as good as it was before, even slightly better. As if he casually grew a little older, and I became a little younger.

The next ten or twelve days imprinted on my mind with gradual rapprochement, recognition and almost serene friendly consent. 

We used to get up not later than six, and through the open French windows I could hear the vague noise of Elio waking up. After splashing my face with cold water, I would run down the stairs to the garden and often find him there, already descended, with a score or a book. We went swimming or running, and breakfast was awaiting us upon our arrival. 

Elio made his working place under the balcony by the pool at the round table with an umbrella, the edges of which were trembling in the wind and casting such a changing shadow on our notebooks. In the first days I sat there too, but I had always lacked self-discipline. Just like the air itself, I occupied all the available space. My shameful inability (or rather unwillingness) to organize the necessary objects and my inherent laziness led to the fact that I was always surrounded by messed up pages of my future book, pencils or colored pens of all sorts, glasses with or without lemonade, fruits, sun-protection cream, books, sunglasses and other stuff. The same thing was happening in my room, where I no longer stayed during the day. Eventually I started to just spread a large blanket on the grass and work there, surrounded by my clutter. 

The tinkling of ice cubes in the glasses of lemonade, the noise of a rather close surf softly stroking the giant coastal rocks, popular melodies coming from somewhere, walking round and round like patrolmen, the frantic screeching of cicadas, the singing of blackbirds – these summer songs were playing in the background, never becoming too troublesome. When my eyes were getting tired, or it was too hot or I just became lazy, and the air was getting heavy with the smell of rosemary and pines, I often moved closer to the water, to the high edge of the pool. I covered my face with straw hat, switched on the player, selecting something calming and light, and shook my leg in the water. Sometimes I spent the whole siesta in such heavenly bliss, and in then Elio would not go to his place, instead lying in the shadow on the deckchair with a book or his guitar. 

Sometimes the weather would surprise us. On windy days it was impossible to work or have breakfast outside, and when the dishes were removed from the table, we took the living room. I lay on my back or stomach, hanging myself over the low armrest of the sofa and spreading the translation sheets over the floor; Elio would sit right on the carpet, crossing his legs and surrounding himself with books or music sheets. 

“Now we see that to understand means to comprehend, to rise above time, moreover, raise the cognized, however transient it may be, above the supra-temporal height. I wrote it three months ago. Did you understand anything?” I asked.

Elio raised his head from the music notebook and listened to me with attention; then he took the page from me and re-read the marked phrase slowly.

“Not much, to be honest. But it made sense for you when you were writing it. Try to put yourself in the place of the past you: what if you’ll remember?”

I tried.

“I think I wanted to say that Heraclitus’s followers blend the fact and its meaning. On this basis they make an erroneous conclusion that the changing nature of the fact excludes immutability of its meaning. Or the immutability of the truth about this fact." 

“The famous paradox that when we bring objects too close to our eyes we lose the ability to conceive them as a whole?” 

“Something like that.”

“But it’s probably three times shorter than your self-quote. Why don’t you use this instead?”

“Have you ever seen a scientific monograph on philosophy written in the language of journalism? However, I’ll think about it.”

In the evenings, on rainy or windy days we had another thing to do: Elio taught me to play along. I sat down on the banquette to hos left and held his waist or shoulders with my right hand in order not to fall down. At first not much was coming out of it, but I quickly remembered my music lessons, we adjusted to each other, and Elio was leaving me the right to play some melodic pattern, hold the theme, in other words, while he was improvising. 

“I wouldn’t be able to play Haydn in four-hands”, I used to say, laughing and waving my hand. “See, only in three! I’m a disabled man, not a pianist.” 

“But you can tell bad playing from good. That’s already something!” he insisted. 

I played poker couple of times a week, and one evening we went to the cinema. It was a professor’s idea, and no one wanted to come with us, whether accidentally or not. 

The film we came to see was “Nostalgia” by Andrey Tarkovski. The Italy of voluntary exile, a place of true mental crisis where one can only feel bad. The state of suffocating, depressive melancholy filling the screen space of this movie made it truly dark. Not the best choice for pleasant leisure, perhaps; I wouldn’t take a girlfriend to see this film, that’s for sure. But Elio, who was apparently on cloud nine, looked as if he would even agree to see “Friday the 13th”. After the movie we walked along the coastline for a long time, talking about Verdi’s Requiem and Beethoven’s Symphony No.9 that played in the film. We were discussing how true the director’s idea was that you cannot be an intermediary, an interpreter or a connoisseur of pieces of art if you are not part of the culture from which they come from; about why it is often so difficult to simply walk from one end of a dried pool to the other with a lighted candle; finally, about whether it is true that only the love that has no expression is absolute. 

“Well, this is true from a certain point of view; there is no one better than the one you actually know almost nothing about,” Elio noted. "Remember this song? You can never win or lose, if you don't run the race.” 

I immediately remembered a hit song “Love my way”, to which we danced at the discotheque in B. I was often surprised by Elio’s ability to instantly find something to express feelings with, the same way as I would express them, and understand them as I would understand them. This comprehension in our case was probably purely intuitive; he hardly had love tragedies in his life. 

This doesn’t mean that there were no dark clouds on our interaction's horizon. Sometimes I was the one to blame for that. I played the part of an open, loving person with my eyes closed, but it hampered me occasionally, and I strove unconsciously to change from my spiritual tuxedo to a loose shirt. Sometimes, Elio touched a certain string in me by an unexpected action or a reaction to something, and I had to remind myself of the red line that I almost didn’t notice at other times. 

For example, I realized that I had the power to make him embarrassed or blush; if I were a bit more self-confident or if I didn’t look so stubbornly past the obvious, I would have decided that it was for a reason by the end of my first week at the villa. But I ignored the prophetic inscriptions and bluffed like a poker player, believing that something didn't exist until I called a spade a spade. And I failed to realize until a certain moment that my inner world had already consumed Elio, his music, his books, his image, like a desert can consume a lake of clean, cool water; that I had been long learning to call him by the name, uttering it to myself with various intonations, savoring and turning it at different angles. And I got used to it too quickly; it sounded too pleasant in my thoughts, and I wouldn’t have been able to abandon it. 

Once we went swimming very early; and while the breakfast was being made under an old lime tree, we started talking about poetry translations. Word by word – and we are already twisting Leopardi’s lines, testing them like an electronic calculator. Everyone knows if you divide, say, two by three, and then multiply the result by three, you won’t get exactly two. Instead of a beautiful figure, there will be something scarily decimal on the screen, as if a part of the final number got lost somewhere on the way. We translated one quatrain from “To the Moon” into English, then – from English into ancient Greek, then – into some other language, German or something; then we reversed the chain. As a result, instead of “How pleasant is it, in the days of youth, when hope a long career before it hath,  
and memories are few, upon the past to dwell, though sad, and though the sadness last!” we got something suspiciously resembling “Waste not your Hour, my friend, nor in the vain pursuit of This and That endeavour and dispute…” 

“Better be short-sided with the fruitful Grape than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit!” Elio finished his quasi-transcribing Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with pathos. We burst into laughter, and then, exhausted, fell silent as one man.

“Have you read Khayyam?” 

Elio looked up at me, and his cheeks blushed suddenly. His skin was very pale, lighter than mine, and his inherent internal fire broke through it easily. I kept on staring at him; I was interested whether he was embarrassed because of knowing such specific lyrics or of uncovering his tastes for me. 

He looked away. “He looks at life like a dog on an empty can tied to his tail… as they say – if you can’t untie, at least fill it in the next bar. Funny, don’t you think?” he mumbled. 

I came closer and put my hands on the back of his chair, leaning closer and catching his eye. “Funny”. This definition suited Khayyam perfectly, who observed his life as if from the top of a hill. 

“Do you like Leopardi?” he asked. 

“Yes, very much.”

“I like him very much too."

“You’ve read so much. I'm almost a decade older than you are and until a few days ago had never heard of Giuseppe Belli or Paul Celan. I don't get it.” 

Elio seemed to try and look at me but failed in doing so. 

“What's not to get?” there was an obvious challenge in his joking words. “Dad's a university professor. I grew up without TV. Get it now?” 

I wanted to punish him for this insolence. I pulled off the towel that was still hanging around my neck, crumpled it and threw it into his face. 

"Go back to your plunking, will you!"

*****

So the summer was passing – slowly, as if with laziness, or rushing and foaming like a mountain stream. And then that fateful July day came and literally everything changed. 

The night before it had been storming, and by morning the weather didn’t recover yet. A fairly strong wind was blowing; the site of the sea didn’t evoke any desire to swim. Moreover, the high waves were crashing against the rocks, demonstrating what they would do to anyone who dared to enter the water. But after breakfast the weather broke through; the sun was shining brightly, and one could expect that by noon I would be drawn to _orle of paradise_ again. So it happened and after having worked with the professor for an hour or two, I lounged on the edge of the pool on a folded towel. 

Elio lifted his head from his music sheets, into which he buried his head hastily after seeing me. He was obviously daydreaming instead of working. I smiled; I myself often found myself driven away to somewhere from the pre-Heraclitean philosophy. Did the long morning hours, drowsy and predisposing to a simple contemplation of beauty, cause it, or was it the fact that our talks became much more interesting, and our joint silence cozier? 

“Oliver, are you sleeping?” Elio often asked, as if uncertain whether I would let him wake me up. The numbness binding my brain immersed me in a kind of nirvana, where I was rocking on the waves tasting and smelling of honey. 

“I was.”

“Sorry.” I hoped that the hat on my face was covering my smirk.

Or another way – as it happened on that day.

“Elio.”

“Yes?”

“What are you doing?”

“Reading.”

“No, you’re not.” He did not realize how often he rustled the pages when he read. 

“Thinking, then.”

"About?"

And there is a long pause.

"Private."

"So you won't tell me?" 

"So I won't tell you."

“Which means I’m not worthy of his trust,” I translated melancholically to the universe, making Elio excuse himself. “I’m hurt.” 

“I won’t tell you anyway,” he said again, more confident this time. I heard a sly smile in his voice, indicating that he had noticed my trap.

“Then I’m going back to sleep,” I answered humbly and half-opened my eye, intending to watch him covertly from under the brim of my hat. 

Elio was looking at me, and there was no doubt as to WHERE and HOW he was looking. 

My body reacted as if it was whipped. Under this look, I got aroused so quickly that in a moment I would not be able to hide what was happening. I couldn’t let him notice that and did the only thing that I could have done in this situation. Without thinking or hesitating, I rolled over and dove into the water as deep as I could. From under the water I saw that Elio jumped up and ran up to the edge. The reflection of his frightened face leaning over the water was trembling and shaking in the waves caused by me. I waited several seconds for the cool water to take its effect and surfaced suddenly, sending a massive spray at him. With a cry of surprise, he shielded himself with his hand and leaned over, trying to splash at me. In return, I dragged Elio down into the pool as he was, in his T-shirt and shorts. 

“Unfa-!” The greenish water swallowed his scream. He surfaced, snorting. We frolicked in the pool like dolphins, chased each other with laughter, and finally grabbed the edge with our hands. Elio threw his wet hair from the forehead, finger-combing it back. This hairdo, as I had noticed before, made him look older and… damn, so seductive that my knees were trembling. “What if…” was rapidly turning into “why not?” I could have pulled him close, chest to chest, kiss him… the one who looked at my cock THAT way wouldn’t have protested… I shook my head, throwing the delusion away. “Later,” I said to myself. “I will think about it later.” This was my way of dealing with questions that I had no answers for – or had no answers for yet. 

While changing in my room, I was reflecting upon my impressions from this swimming and everything that preceded it. Could it be that Elio was drawn to me in the same way I was drawn to him? There were sunny and green sparks flickering in his light eyes that were both promising and not. I was asking myself again and again whether I really saw them. He was always looking away, as if hiding something from me; is it a plain shyness or an unwillingness to show the awakened interest? The tip of a pink tongue touching his lips, the shape of which would have been labeled “Cupid’s Bow” by old busybodies – was it because of excitement, or did Elio just licked lemonade drops? Was the flutter of another's heart I heard just an echo of my own heartbeat? A second’s pause when I gave him my hand, helping him out of the pool – did he actually lean towards me? 

At that moment I realized that if I had a chance to win Elio’s heart, I would use it. What once was just a figment of my imagination could turn true. My blood started burning from the thought that this reality could lead us to one bed, and I had to stand under the cold shower immediately. But I, putting it together, refused to take the seemingly obvious answer; I couldn’t let this flame ignite based solely on my assumptions that probably had nothing to do with reality. I wanted to understand whether I had that chance. 

Sunny summer Italy, youth, strong health, plenty of spare time, wonderful music, exquisite food and a good company – one can’t hide from the all-around sensuality and romantic atmosphere. Isn’t it silly to think that it won’t go to Elio’s head, make him feel like any other young man would feel in his place? 

Later, instead of siesta, everyone went to the sea, making up for the day lost before. The house suddenly became empty; we were left alone in it. He was in his room; I was in his room too, which was mine now. There can’t be a better moment to “understand”. 

I came in without knocking, right from the balcony. Elio was lying on the bed, dressed up, with a book. I caught the rapid movement with which he pulled his knees to his chest at the sight of me. 

“Why didn’t you go to the beach with everyone else?” I asked as casually as I could. 

He hesitated and looked away again; I saw clearly that he was stalling as if he did not want to reveal the answer he had. My heart started beating faster. 

“Bad allergy,” he shrugged his shoulders. “Why didn’t you go?”

Now I was in the same predicament. I couldn’t say it directly. “To stay with you, Elio. To know your wishes. To make my naked skin feel yours. To taste your mouth, your shoulder if you don’t mind.” 

“Me too,” I answered. “We probably have the same one.”

He shrugged his shoulders again. I came closer. 

“What's wrong? What upset you so much? Want to go for a swim?” 

“Later, maybe,” he said. My preferred evasiveness used against me! 

“Let’s go now,” I persistently stretched my hand to help him get up.

He took my hand. “Must we?” he asked quietly. 

The blush covering his neck and the unambiguous lump in his groin, which I saw clearly now, told me everything. I understood why he was so confused. Not only because he had an erection, but also because he failed to hide it from me. It could only mean one thing. I let go of his hand and stepped back.

“I’ll change and wait for you downstairs.” 

It seems that I wasn’t wrong. Elio was not unaware of the bodily desires, and apparently, I was one of the sources of these desires. However, during those two weeks, I have been acting in such a way that I could be taken for anyone – everyone’s favorite, friend, guest, but not the… Suddenly I realized that we had been flirting for a decent time, and the fact that Elio avoided looking into my eyes confirmed that he understood that too. 

Come to think of it, we found so many reasons for flirting! 

Take peaches and apricots, for example. 

“Yours,” I said, throwing the juiciest and ripest fruit of those I had just collected; he plunged white even teeth into the fragrant succulent pulp, wiped the juice drops away from his face with a finger and licked it, fully covering said finger with his lips. In response, I invented a Little Something about ice cream in cones. I didn’t lick or bite it – I sucked it. 

When I arrived he didn’t have a chain with the Star of David on his neck, but it appeared after a few days. The same as mine. 

Or let us take my manner of an unknown origin – when going up the stairs to our balcony, freeze against his French window or stand down for a moment in the hall near the door to his room, as if asking myself whether I shall come in. 

And then there’s music. When I asked him to play something, I never knew what would come out of it. 

“I can’t believe it,” I used to say. “You’ve changed everything again.”

“Just a little bit. This is just how Busoni would have played it if he had altered Liszt's version.” 

“Can't you just play the Bach the way Bach wrote it?!” 

"But Bach never wrote anything for guitar. He may not even have written it for the harpsichord. In fact, we're not even sure it's by Bach at all!"

“All right, forget I asked,” I conceded. It was my turn to feign grudging acquiescence.

“Fine, fine. Don’t be so tense,” he answered, following me like a partner in tango. “This is a very young Bach as transcribed by me. Don’t worry; there would be no Busoni or Liszt.” 

And then he'd finally play the fragment the way I wanted. The way it sounded in the garden for the first time. And it was like a small present for me every time he played it. 

Elio could play me Ravel as if it was Wagner and spoil all the pleasure, or he could play Wagner as if it was Ravel. Not a single person of his age of those that I’d heard of could use notes so freely – like an experienced sharper with a cold deck. I liked his combinations of two, three or even four composers chiming in the same piece and then transcribed by him. I could listen to him play the magnificent Nino Rota from memory for hours. Once, Chiara, one of our neighbors, was humming a hit-parade tune and suddenly (as it was another windy day, and no one went to the beach or was willing to leave the house) our friends gathered around the piano in the living room as Elio improvised a Brahms variation on a Mozart rendition of that very same song. 

“How do you do this?” I asked him later, when the wind stopped and everyone started wandering around the garden, and I folded myself a towel in _heaven_ as usual. 

“Sometimes the only way to understand the artist is to wear his shoes, to get inside him. Then everything else flows naturally,” he answered. 

Also considering our sitting on the same banquette, with our heads together, while we were, as busy as bees, torturing the ears of our folks with musical exercises.

And the family TV-watching on rainy days? It got cold, and we sat in the living room with a blanket around us, and my outstretched hand lay on the back of the sofa above his shoulders. And we felt so snug and warm being together, while we were listening to the raindrops drumming on the stone patio tiles. 

These were actions without other actions behind them, roundabout ways instead of a straight road. If it was not flirting, then what was it?

It is strange to find someone a thousand miles away from home in my immediate world; someone else who might like what I liked … and want what I wanted. 

Hence, Elio realized what he wanted. Did he have any experience? I could swear he hadn’t; therefore, I couldn’t rely on sincerity and straightforwardness. 

The next day I decided to let him understand my intentions and make sure that my touch wasn’t unpleasant to him. We were playing doubles, and during the break, as we came to the table with refreshments prepared by Mafalda (I have to admit, she’s a genius in terms of cooking), I put my hand on Elio’s naked shoulder, as if I was going to knead his stiff muscles. The gesture was rather friendly – half-hug, half-massage of a kind. Italians are natural and inclined to tactile contact; that is why it could not have alarmed anyone - the whole thing was very chummy-chummy. He could have chosen any way to response, but I was surprised, or, to be honest, unpleasantly struck when he slid out of my touch immediately. As if I grabbed his ass openly instead of putting my hand on his shoulder. 

“Did I touch the nerve? Scratched you? Sorry, I didn’t mean to.” 

“No, I’m not hurt,” he mumbled, but he had the face of someone trying very hard, but failing, to smother a grimace of pain. I pretended to believe it. “I don’t know what actor I would be, but you would be truly bad, Elio,” I thought. It was not pain; it was aversion, bordering with unspoken anger and irritation. And suddenly what seemed to be natural and permitted started to look like a dirty harassment. 

“Do yourself an honor and keep your cool,” I told myself. “Don’t disclose the real reason of your mixed feelings to anyone. It will turn out to be funny or ridiculous, or evoke pity.”

Having gone to my room as soon as I could, I lay on the bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling. My sight is jaundiced - I have seen wrong. My mind is warped - I have judged wrong. Only my tongue didn’t betray me – I said the right thing. I could easily deal with the fact that I had been mistaken. It was harder to accept the fact that I, as it turned out, got used to Elio, forgot the age gap and the fact that he was the son of my host. As if my mind was turned off I let my thoughts wander, imagining with interest and pleasure how it could have been between us. 

Considering Elio’s reaction, there was nothing left to do but keep the longest possible distance, tear the treads of the forming intimacy at once. I was somehow sure that I would be able to come back to my old life as if nothing had happened, and that my ability to turn the pages of life without regret or remorse, which had served me flawlessly in the past, would serve me once again just as well. “Who’s Elio?” someone would ask me. “Wait a minute, I think that was the name of an… Italian? Yes, something fleeting, it seems, in Sicily… right?” I would answer.  
However, I was haunted by vague disquiet. This task could turn out to be much harder than before; that is what my inner voice was whispering to me. My heart craved for his heart; my body was longing to entwine with his.

Like everyone, I’ve made mistakes in my life, both small and big, but I’m not actually ashamed of many things. I’ve never broken a word, never promised the gardens of Eden to anyone, never stolen anything, killed anyone or made others to kill. But I’m still ashamed of the way I chose that time.

I’m talking about Chiara.

And it’s not even that I slept with her. For that matter, I sincerely tried to give and take pleasure without doing anything she didn’t like. The thing was that I started a romance with her almost for show for the sole purpose to avoid embarrassment and make Elio believe he had got me wrong. 

It seems Pierpont Morgan once said that a man generally has two reasons for doing a thing; one that sounds good, and a real one. I could attempt to justify myself by trying to get back on the right track, even say that I was helping Elio do the same, but it would be just a beautiful wrapper for the ugly truth. Even worse than just ugly: deep down, I wanted to avenge my ludicrous hopes. And though neither Chiara nor Elio knew it, I did. 

There are many reasons why we, Americans, are little known as lovers; undoubtedly, the fearsome scarecrow of our traditionally Puritan upbringing takes the top spot. It spoils everyone, men and women alike. It makes our girls not sexual, but _sexy_. However, it has nothing to do with enjoying one’s own sensuality. Being _sexy_ means making a man crave your body so much that he would want to marry you. 

Chiara was not like that. She took whatever she wanted and saw no problem with that. She didn’t treat her body as a precious gem that cannot be spoiled by anything, even one’s own eroticism. 

I came across Chiara the next morning. She dropped by the professor’s house with her younger sister, picked up my shirt from the grass and threw it at me. 

“Enough working. We’re going to the beach, and you’re coming with us,” she said. 

And I was willing to oblige. 

“Let me just put away these papers. Otherwise his father will skin me alive,” I pointed at Elio casually. 

“Talking about skin… Come here,” she said, and with her fingernails gently and slowly tried to pull a sliver of peeling skin from my shoulder. Despite the time spent in Sicily I still got sunburns occasionally.

“Tell him it was me who crumbled the papers. Let’s see what he would say.” 

Charming, isn’t it? 

I asked the professor to give us the twin-hulled rowboat if the sea was calm, while Chiara was standing by my side; this left little doubt about what we were going to do. I saw later that Elio watched us hugging, and laughed to myself. Sometimes in the afternoon, I said intentionally that I was going to the shed by the garage where Anchise kept tools and garden stuff to pick up one of the bikes and head to town. 

“Need to see the translator,” I explained, pretending to be embarrassed. “I’ll be back in an hour and a half.” 

“The translator, as if,” I heard the professor muttering behind my back. 

“ _Traduttrice_ , indeed,” Mafalda repeated after him in a singing voice. 

Elio, of course, heard all of it. 

Thanks to my affair with Chiara, I expanded my circle of acquaintances significantly and almost stopped dining at the professor’s house; I entered the circle of serious bridge players. As is well known, a game of bridge lasts for several hours, and you cannot just interrupt it, unlike poker. I always had someone who would accompany me in the bars on the piazzetta or visit “Le Danzing”. In addition to my improved Italian, it had another advantage: I stopped my close communication with Elio without getting involved in excuses and explanations that would have looked petty, to be fair. 

I made sure it was evident that he was just a kid for me, the one everyone talks to for not showing lack of politeness towards the hosts. My mood skyrocketed when I managed to intercept his angry look, when I warned him that I wouldn’t come to dinner, or replied to his invitation to go swimming with “I’ve already gone”. 

However, I failed to foresee a counterattack: he started telling me some nice or provocatively exciting things about Chiara, describing the beauty of her body. Whether he was trying to make me speak frankly or let me understand that he obviously preferred females – this humiliation enraged me completely; I started to hate Elio. Who did he think he was to uncover my secret desires so easily, just to see how I would react to a rejection?! Nevertheless, I’d known the game of “like-minded males” for a longer time.

“Why do you care, anyway?” I asked, thus refusing to play it. “Are you trying to make me like her?” 

“What would the harm be in that?” 

“No harm. Except I like to go it alone, if you don’t mind.” 

And it was me – me! – who hunkered down while trying to put him in his place. But I achieved what I wanted: our friendship ran dry. Even when we worked side by side in the mornings, our talk was all empty remarks at best. It couldn’t have even been called idle talk. But my heart nearly jumped out of my chest when I saw him in the usual place in the garden, and I froze, realizing that my tactics turned against me. I wanted to make him jealous, which means I still wanted him. From there it was as far to the necessary indifference as to the Moon, and I rushed away, saying only “Later!” just to interrupt Elio’s stream of thought, as I was afraid to be uncovered by his inquiring look. 

Sometimes at night, we bumped into each other in "Le Danzing". He used to come there with Marcia and her friends, me – with Chiara; if she couldn’t come, I picked someone up right there. Eventually, some people told Chiara about it, and she started a pure _scandalo Italiano_. I didn’t know how to raise hell properly, and under other circumstances, I would have even been pleased and tried to end it as such scandals between lovers usually end, by dragging her into bed, but instead I grabbed at it as a reason for a proper quarrel. This affair had served its purpose by then. 

“We almost did it”, Elio said during breakfast one morning. Signora Annella was cutting the roses; the professor was looking through the morning newspaper; I was enjoying my coffee. After hearing those words, I almost choked. Elio was learning too quickly. Or, perhaps, he saw right through me. 

“Almost? Marcia? Why didn’t you?” the professor asked, emerging from behind the newspaper. 

“Dunno.” 

“You know what they say? It’s better to regret what you’ve done…” I was trying to speak facetiously, hoping that Elio wouldn’t notice my momentary bewilderment or quickened heartbeat. 

“I only needed to find courage, and she would have said yes,” he replied. 

I think he was showing off. 

“Try again later,” I advised cunningly. 

“Later, just like tomorrow, never comes.” 

“I'd definitely try again. And again after that. It’s got to be ‘now’ sometimes!” 

“If not now, when?” the professor joined the conversation amicably. “I like that more.”

This mutual grudge appeared to be hard to bear, and we started softening it with something impersonal – music, the pre-Socratic philosophy, colleges in the U.S. Elio still sat down at the piano in the afternoons or in the evenings, or played the guitar occasionally when I asked him. And I found another distraction – Vimini. 

She first intruded on our morning before the fateful game of doubles. Once a girl too serious for her age came and asked Elio, who was playing Brahms’s variation of Handel:

“What are you doing?” 

I’d never seen her before, but I felt immediately that it was a special territory, and that it had its own special rules. I turned to Elio, and he understood everything correctly. 

“Oliver, meet Vimini, literally our next-door neighbor.” She offered me her hand, and I shook it. “Vimini and I have the same birthday, but she is ten years old. She is also a genius. Isn't it true you're a genius, Vimini?” 

“So they say. But I don’t think I am.” 

“Why?” I asked, kneeling down right on the grass and trying not to sound too patronizing. 

“It would be in rather bad taste for nature to have made me a genius.” 

I was shocked.

“Come again?”

“He doesn’t know, does he?”

Elio shook his head.

“They say I won’t live long. I have leukemia.”

If someone had told me earlier that I would be happy to speak to a ten-year-old girl who knew such a thing about herself, I would have thought that this someone had a wild imagination. But the fact remains that nothing comforted my soul and clarified my thoughts like the time spent with Vimini. She needed to be spared, like people spare children, but it was never necessary to play a part, to pretend with her. She needed help, but never hanged on anyone, unlike Chiara or Marcia, and it was a pleasure, not a duty, to lend her a willing hand on the stairway leading to the sea, walk her home or read for her. We read and discussed “Little Women”, “Jane Eyre”, “Barchester Towers”, “The Woman in White”. Vimini had an old head on young shoulders – she judged everything simply, but with a wisdom that is often absent in people who are three or four times older. It seemed like she had already lived her life, understood its essence and was calmly and quietly waiting for it to end. She also gave herself to sadness completely, like only adults do; even the wrinkled face of a Russian immigrant yearning for his homeland didn’t bear such evident signs of nostalgia as her childish face did. And frankly, I believed once and for all my sincerity wouldn't harm me if I'm brave enough for it. Vimini possessed something I would call the instinctive understanding of the personal and the inherent tact. 

Sure, I wasn’t going to explore its limits practically and didn’t touch upon some subjects, but I failed to hide my attraction towards Elio. I understood it when Vimini said with all her seriousness: “You are at odds with Elio, that`s wrong.”

“It happens,” I tried to explain the unexplainable. “People fall out sometimes. Then they forget about it.” 

“People do, but you don’t. He likes you very much, and you’re hurting him.” 

“He didn’t tell me,” I burst out accidentally. I truly hoped that the sexual aspect of this liking escaped Vimini. “Did he tell you himself?” 

“No,” she shook her head. “But I see it. And I see that you like him too and that you are hurt as well.” 

Hurt? I couldn’t have used that word to describe what I was feeling at the moment. Imagine the fear of a man calmly stepping on a bridge and suddenly realizing that the bridge is made of glass, and that there is the abyss underneath it. Did I jump to conclusions and made a mistake again? Was I wrong punishing Elio for the way he recoiled from me? Was it not aversion? Until then, I hadn’t thought that it was a kind of a protective need to lock down, especially because earlier Elio had opened himself too much; that he was probably inclined to perceive his own actions too difficult and the actions of other people too simple. That moment I regretted my rationality, my inability to act without thinking about consequences. “I’ll think about later.” Well, if later never comes, then it is not worth regretting. Who knows, probably I could’ve already enjoyed warmth and intimacy if I hadn’t destroyed the trust. It could be broken with a single wrong movement that I apparently did. 

“What do you want me to do?” I asked after a moment of silence. 

Vimini looked at me as if I was ten years old.

“Make peace with him. Please. I don’t like it when my friends are unhappy.” 

What could I say? “Not that it is as easy as ABC,” I thought. We couldn't just make a pinky promise and say "Cross my heart".  
A convenient opportunity presented itself a couple of days later, when, as usual, we interrupted our work for a while for the sake of lazy chatter. I lit a cigarette; Elio started chewing an apple. 

“Chiara had dropped by today,” he said unexpectedly. “When you went to see Signora Milani. She asked to tell you.” I nodded. “You’re a beautiful couple,” he added. 

Instead of putting him in his place, as I had done before, I tried to get rid of the reason for the coldness between us.

“We’re not a couple. You’re on the wrong track.” 

Elio slowly put the half-eaten apple aside. 

“What do you mean, wrong track?” 

“I’m not interested.” 

Making excuses was not among my habits, and I was feeling quite awkward. Probably, for this reason, my voice sounded dry and irked. 

“But I saw you two…” 

“It’s not what you think. Anyway, the game is over.” 

I blew out a smoke cloud and looked knowingly into Elio’s eyes. 

He shook his shoulders. 

“Okay, sorry.” And he returned to his books, hiding in them like a shellfish inside the shell. Didn’t he believe me? Was he afraid? Did he decide to take revenge? I suddenly got excited; I had to get him out of his shell at any cost. 

“Maybe you should try,” I said. 

I was playing it on the verge of decency, and I knew it.

“She wouldn’t want it.” 

“Would you?”

I was pushing him towards the edge of the abyss. Whatever he answered, this would give me the key. 

“No.”

It sounded… tense, even aggressive. He clearly didn’t understand what I was hinting at, and walked wide, expecting a trick. What a contrast with the first weeks of our friendship, still not invaded by mistrust, jealousy and forbidden feelings! No wonder they say that an angel starts flying on a broom if you cut off his wings. 

“Are you sure? I know…”

“What would you know?” Elio interrupted me defiantly.

“I know you like her.”

“You have no idea whom or what I like!” He almost exploded, throwing the pencil away. “No idea at all!”

I finally made him lose the mask and could triumph, but I just looked at him. And I couldn’t recognize him. His eyes were sparkling with unshed tears and deep hopeless longing. And everything went away in a moment. My irritation, the all-devouring anger evaporated, as if these emotions that had been eating me from the inside only needed to see him suffer. Well, I saw it. And before the next stroke of my heart I swore to myself - whatever Elio does, I will never hate him again. 

*****

Our relations seemingly improved, but from that moment on they were as if we tied our eyes voluntarily and balanced on a rope waiting for the first of us to fall down. 

As before, we worked alongside each other, and our picking and teasing slowly turned into casual lazy conversations. We discussed fragments from Heraclitus, the trip to E., which the professor was planning to undertake, tried to guess what will be in the program of chamber music ensemble that was about to come to B. On windy days, I was lying on the sofa with a manuscript or a book taken randomly from the professor’s extensive library, but Elio stopped sitting down on the carpet next to the sofa and settled at the table instead. Our lessons of three-hand piano playing stopped as well. 

On the other hand… I noticed with remarkable frequency the familiar silhouette with a crown of dark curls. The bank, the trattoria where we used to play poker, the piazzetta. At the lunch, in the living room, in the professor’s study, I almost constantly felt his stubborn stare, and intercepted it, turning around, thus making Elio blush deeply.

This was getting surreal – I felt him near when I could swear there was no one around. After my affair with Chiara, having no clear excuse for my absence every evening and every night, except for poker two or three times a week, I got used to sitting in a secluded place I discovered accidentally by the sea; the even whisper of waves and the sky full of stars above my head plunged me into a kind of meditative trance. But even this proven means began to fail more and more often. I saw Elio’s look even there, and I used to turn around inadvertently and gaze into the darkness of the night, as if someone was calling me by the name. The road through the field, the balcony that shielded our small world, my room, even my bed – nothing could guarantee safety to me anymore. 

The smell of his skin, his hair invaded my dreams mercilessly, bringing the scary reality into them, and I jumped up in the middle of the night, my heart rushing, in unpleasantly sticky trunks. I asked Mafalda several times to change the bed sheets, saying that I was sweating too much because of the night stuffiness, but it didn’t help much. This went on until I realized that the pillows in which I used to bury my face, the mattress and the blanket absorbed his scent deeply. It could be that even walls and curtains on the window were to blame. It was the aroma of summer Italy itself, with its red ground, dizzying night flowers, pines, sea and citronella candles. Since then, I was destined to inevitable capitulation. 

The instinct of self-preservation at times can cast a shadow upon the most pleasant moments and put an end to unseemly intentions. Elio slept in the next room, and the glass balcony door was always open. I could have enjoyed contemplating him a thousand times, watching him spread on the bed right in his shorts, or abuse the trust slightly, stoking the tousled top of his head, touching his cheek, his chest… 

However, whom was I trying to deceive? I wasn’t attracted by such manifestations of sympathy. I would prefer to undress him, seeing my act only as caring; it is uncomfortable to sleep dressed. I wouldn’t have risked anything; he wouldn’t mind, I knew it for sure from now on. I could have embraced him, covered the line along his collarbones with kisses from the neck to the shoulder, caressed his flexible back, made him moan and beg me silently for more, until he gave up and gave himself to me. 

Did I only want to possess him? I already couldn’t answer confidently, as I was perfectly aware that I was drowning deeper and deeper every day. I was fighting the irrational fear, gathering all my resources, searching and finding multiple reasons why we couldn’t be together, starting with the anger of the professor or signora Annella and ending with the fact that he would turn away from me after trying and realizing that the reality is way too far from the imagination. 

What did Elio actually know about men who wanted each other? Was he really ready to touch another man’s penis with his hand or lips? Was he able to imagine what could follow? Did he know how hurtful could be the rude word that people might call him? 

Maybe he simply had not yet understood that to test one’s own desires in such a way meant to go for a trick, to try and get what you wanted without admitting to yourself that you wanted exactly that. I wasn’t thrilled by the idea of becoming a training field for experiments with someone else’s sexuality. 

The need to watch myself wore me down more and more each day. I felt that I was saved by his indecision, that he would rather die than call spade a spade. I flattered myself that the things would stay as they were till I left the villa.


	2. Up the Down Staircase

My hope evaporated faster than the drops of morning dew do under the hot sun. Elio gave up at last. 

It was right after breakfast. I was sitting on the edge of the pool, pretending to read, but actually admiring thoughtlessly the reflections trembling on the rippled water surface. I had no idea where a simple offer to accompany me on my trip to signora Milani would lead. 

On our way there, I caught myself thinking that I didn’t want to hurry, as if we had nothing better to do. That sweet moment between _always_ and _never_ , when the time slows down, giving you a chance to feel its transience. Just a second – and a hundred missed opportunities flashed past; only sixteen days – and I’ll leave, turn another page of life and will hardly ever remember this longing, scalding dreams haunting me at night… 

Elio will leave my life irreversibly in sixteen days. 

That was probably the first time I let myself count them accurately. 

We reached the square. I desperately needed a smoke, so I bought Gauloises. Elio asked whether I could treat him. I took out one cigarette and cupped my hands near his face, and lit his cigarette. I could’ve just given him a lighter. 

Farther out and way below was a magnificent view of the sea: it was calm; only several hardly visible strips of foam were on the crests of waves crashing against the rocks.

“You do know who is said to have drowned near here,” I asked. 

“Yes, I know. Shelley.”

“And do you know what his wife Mary and his friends did when they found the body?” 

“Cor cordium,” Elio answered immediately. 

Maybe the legend of the poet’s heart that resisted the fire for so long and the loyal friend who took it out of the funeral pyre with his bare hands is just a legend, but it is a beautiful legend nonetheless. 

“Is there anything you don’t know?” 

“I know nothing, Oliver. Nothing about things that really matter.”

I felt as if the rope was starting to tear. Did Elio actually mean what I was thinking? 

“What things that matter?” 

“You’re the only one who knows for sure.”

Silence. Well, Elio has confessed.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I thought you should know,” he blurted. “Because there is no one else I can say it to but you.” 

How did I feel in that moment? Like a man whose clothes were torn off in the middle of a crowd, because the events were rapidly getting out of my hand. Elio dropped the other shoe, and all the misunderstandings to hide behind were gone. I had wanted this impossible guy for so long that I was now truly afraid of myself and my desires; I didn’t know how to lock this Pandora's Box securely. 

This is how it ended – disbelief was my only shield and my only salvation. I asked Elio again and again whether he understood what was happening. And he answered again and again that my guesses were right. But this time I was not at all sure whether he understood it in the same way I did. I had an experience; he didn’t. If the interpreter hadn’t messed the pages up and deprived me of my work, I would be hardly able to understand at least one line from my own book that day. 

“I wish I hadn’t spoken,” Elio finally said when we were leaving the square and preparing to go back. He already regretted his confession. More to come. 

“I’ll pretend that you haven’t spoken. Let’s think it was an illusion.” 

Ten minutes ago I wanted desperately to turn back the time, and now Elio was giving me a chance to consider the fatal words unspoken. I should have been happy, but I wasn't; now it was as impossible to come back to the easy manners of the first weeks as make a young oak rushing to the sun and light grow back into the acorn. 

“Catch up,” I said quickly and rushed down the hill as if hellhounds were on my tail. But however quickly I pedaled, I knew Elio would catch up with me. He always did. 

We were rushing all the way over the road through the field, which was deserted at that time of the day. It was so beautiful! Smell mint, lavender, and rosemary; tall stems of sunflowers bent almost to the ground, unable to withstand the gravity of golden inflorescences. On the other side of the road, the lace woven by sunbeams breaking through the foliage was falling askew under our wheels. I longed for this trip to never end. Speed, wind in my face and the efforts I was making relieved me of the necessity to THINK. The inevitability to make a DECISION. 

Elio, who had gotten ahead of me, stopped by an inconspicuous fork. 

“Do you want me to show you a spot most tourists and strangers had never seen?” Elio asked me, turning around. “It`s the spot where Monet came to paint.” 

Tiny, stunted palms trees and gnarled olive trees studded the corpse. The wavy path led down the slope to tall marine pines. I leaned my bike to one of them; he did the same, and we walked on to a small hillock, partly shaded by pines. From there, a high steep slope covered with high grass began, which ended in a terrace supported by stonework. 

A soundless, quiet cove stood straight below us. Not a sign of civilization anywhere – no home, no jetty, no fishing boats. Belfry of San Giacomo, drowning in greenery, which Elio called _To-die-for_ , ascended a bit further. If you strained your eyes, you could see the silhouettes of houses of the N. city on the left. On the right, farther still was something that looked like Perlman`s house and the adjoining villas, the one where Vimini lived, and the Moreschi family's. 

I held my breath. The heavenly blue was coming down on the ground and the sun so bright, that an eternal summer seemed to reign over this prospect. The heat danced over the corn, and, pervading all, was a soft, insensible hum, like the murmur of bright minutes holding revel between _earth and stars_ ; the emerald blue see below was whispering something to the pines. Blood rushed to my face. Not at once, not in a moment, but little by little the warmth, the radiance and the beauty were captivating me until they took me over completely. To live here, to see this expanse in front of me, to bring the chosen ones here, just like I was brought here today! I looked at Elio sideways; his eyes were watching avidly what he had surely seen hundreds and thousands of times. The bright sun emphasized his features - a line of his jaw, pointy chin and the clear contour of lips. Something invocatory was in this face; as if he was waiting for Goddess Aphrodite to come out to him from the sea. 

A gentle wave passed over the tall grass. The sea breath blew coolness into our faces, pulling a dark curl from the Elio`s temple. 

“This is my spot,” he stretched his hand. “Forever. I come here to read. I can’t tell you how many books I’ve read here.”

Still looking somewhere in front of him, he sat down on the ground. I had nothing left to do but sit down a couple of yards from him. There were sometimes special moments like this one between us: I felt very unsure, too vulnerable, and it would be better for me to say _thanks_ and retreat politely, offer him to continue our journey, but I couldn’t move. This place seemed to erase borders, exist around and inside us. I laid on my back in the grass, threw my hands behind the head and closed my eyes. 

“You`re making things very difficult, even unbearable, for me,” I said a few minutes later. 

“Why?”

I was going to speak as clearly as I could. 

“Now I’ll say it: you’re the only one who knows why.” 

“Is there anything wrong with it?” 

“There is for me. I’m not going to pretend this hasn't crossed my mind.” 

“I think I would be the last to know.” 

“No, you would be the last to hear it,” I objected. “What did you think was going on?” 

“Going on? Nothing.” He was clearly embarrassed. “Nothing.” 

“I see,” I said finally. "If it would be easier for you, I was holding back." 

“The best I could do was pretending I didn’t care.” 

“You’ve succeeded,” I snapped. His indifference and my indifference were a show for our audience, pretense. Were we still pretending?

“You’re the luckiest kid in the world,” I said dreamily. “You have… everything.” 

“I don’t have a half of this ‘everything’,” Elio persisted. 

“Living here all summer long, reading by yourself, all those dinner drudges your father dredges up at every meal,” I enumerated. “Isn’t it enough?” 

Elio didn’t fall for this bait; he knew that we were both talking about us. Well, let’s see… 

I leaned over him and stroked his lower lip with my thumb, lingering before the inevitable. Elio could step back now if he wanted, and I intercepted the scared and excited expression in his eyes. But when I lightly touched his lips, little dry from the excitement, I knew I was gone. It wasn’t even a kiss yet, just a hint of it, and it seemed that something inside of me rushed towards Elio over this shaky bridge. He got down on the ground and pressed his shoulder blades into it, as if he was trying to squeeze it, but I felt his knee intruding between mine. He was sliding away and pulling me to him. Too candid for innocence; too innocent for passion. The arched posture; the lips he was licking, dark pink from the rush of blood… Was I really supposed to throw away all my experience and not take such things as an advance?! 

I had to be a saint to resist what I was offered so persistently. 

According to my opinion that formed much later, I didn’t feel my first kiss with a man. The confusion was so strong I just stood still and allowed to kiss me. I never opened my eyes. 

If someone asked me to describe the taste of our first kiss with Elio, I would be at a loss too. Some absolute disharmony – softness and suppleness, but not a trace of obedience; innocence, wrong and too prudent, but not pretended. When I touched his tongue with mine, he jerked it away, but not in fear; rather, he was hiding in an ambush to take me by surprise and imprison me. I felt the hunger stronger than the physical one and the passion that was rising to fury, and I had to capitulate and control myself tightly. 

“Better now?” I asked, pulling myself away. In response, Elio rushed towards me, and the purple veil of excitement shrouded my eyes. How easy it would be for me to roll over, press Elio down and give myself to the desire that was driving me mad. 

I pulled – God knows how! – myself together. Oh, how glad I was then that I had learned to tame my ardor. Had I indulged, kissed Elio with all the passion; I would hardly be able to stop. To put my hands on his shoulders, pull him away and say quietly: “I think we should go.” 

“Not yet,” he was literally begging.

“We can’t do… I know myself. Let`s keep it that way. I want to be good.” 

Unforgivable naivety: I thought it was still possible to be good. Whom did I hope for, I wonder, if I was betrayed by my body, my heart, my mind… 

“I don’t care. Who is to know?”

And before I knew what he was going to do, his hand rest on my crotch. I wasn’t expecting such boldness but managed to entwine our fingers carefully and pull his hand aside. But it did not matter anymore - he could not miss that I was aroused, and now he was looking at me as a small kamikaze mouse could look at a cat that refused to eat it: you won’t escape from me, buddy.

I tested Elio to let him know what he really wanted, but I didn’t even know whether he passed or failed. As for me, I failed miserably. It should have felt like a horrible mistake. A filthy, foolish mistake of a man helpless before his own drives, which needed to be corrected immediately. It should have felt this way, but it didn’t. Only disregard could help me preserve the remains of my self-respect. 

“We will never speak again,” said Elio bitterly as we returned to the bicycles, the breeze ruffling our hair. “For real, I mean. We will chitchat. That`s all. And the funniest thing is I would never be able to live with that.” 

Will I?

I wouldn’t either. During lunch I failed to resist; I took of one of my espadrilles and found Elio’s foot with mine. I saw him shivering and doing everything to prevent anyone from seeing us caress each other under the table. His cheeks were blushing and his eyes shone suspiciously, but the others, involved in another dispute, did not pay any attention to us. 

The blood that poured from Elio’s nose was a complete surprise. I was struck by a sudden faintness akin to a panic attack; it seemed that I would either burst into tears or lose consciousness. Elio gasped, but then grabbed a napkin quickly, put it into his nostrils and threw his head back. 

“It happens to me sometimes,” he apologized. “I’ve spent too much time in the sun. I’ll ask Mafalda to bring some ice.” 

His self-control surprised me, especially compared to my own confusion. 

“Pull yourself together, pull yourself together,” I kept telling to myself. “Don’t let yourself to show weakness.”

There were no more oddities in my family (in the broader sense of both concepts) than in any other, but among these oddities, there is one that nobody can explain. We become sick at the sight of blood. Probably, due to this reason, my ancestors for several centuries had not become doctors or chosen the warcraft. It is more prominent in men than in women; moreover, it manifests itself in various ways. For example, my father cannot stand the sight of another people’s blood, while at the same time he provides himself with first aid quite well and can even overcast a seam. With me, things are quite opposite. When I was twelve, my sister Rachel inadvertently squeezed the glass so tightly that she literally crushed it; it was me and my mother who tried to stop the bleeding and remove shards from the shredded palm, for my father almost fainted and was sent away from the dining room to meet paramedics. So there was nothing unexpected in my reaction. Much more unexpected was what I realized a bit later - I reacted to Elio’s blood as if it was mine. 

“I’ll think about it later,” I told myself. 

“Was it my fault?” I asked as I stepped into his room after lunch. Elio was half-sitting and half-lying, pressing his head against the wall and keeping a napkin wrapped around ice on his nose. He hadn’t bothered to wash his face yet, and I almost felt sick again at the sight of ominous burgundy blood drips on his chin. 

“Sit for a second,” I heard him murmur from behind the napkin. I sat at the far corner of the bed, at his legs. “Don’t worry, I’ll be fine.” 

I wanted badly to come out to fresh air. I was not good as a doctor or a nurse – for this specific patient, anyway. I answered something polite, fitting the situation, and left. 

I was being torn apart by conflicting desires. I wanted to run away from this house anywhere. I wanted to finish the book at last and appear immediately in New York, get down to the preparation of a course on ancient philosophy, which I was supposed to teach at Barnard College in autumn. And yet something stronger than a ship rope was holding me there. And fear reigned over all this – I reacted to HIS blood as if it was MINE. What did that mean? I avoided this question as I suspected I wouldn’t like the answer. 

Even then I already couldn’t remember anything about the time that passed before the next morning came. 

I know that I was trying to get myself together, sitting on the rocks at my usual place meditating and staring at the sea. But the sunbeams glinting on the water mirror now and then blinded me and I couldn’t focus. I imagine that I darted off to the city because I've realized at some point that I've been holding a deck of cards in my hands; but I don’t remember getting there. I could have gone on foot. I drank something, and quite a lot of it – whiskey, probably, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was also brandy. I drunkenly made out with someone somewhere, and I don’t remember either where did he or she (I hope it was a she) came from. Probably it was her who gave me a lift to the professor’s house late at night. However, this memory lapse actually was a blessing. I didn’t think about Elio, our confessions and what was to come. 

In the morning, I woke up with a headache and acute pains all over my body portending a hell of a hangover. The face from the mirror in my bath was one of a man in his late thirties. There were bags and bruises under my eyes, and wrinkles, and red trails of the blanket folds as I fell asleep with my face down. Along with sobering my worries returned – Elio firmly occupied a small remote place in my thoughts already torn and messy. 

I didn’t feel any better later. I got sick from the sight of toasts. The only things I managed to eat were coffee, a bit of juice and eggs. I broke the top of an egg with a flat spoon; I never learned how to open them properly. 

Elio, who was sitting opposite me, pretended not to notice me. The professor looked past the newspaper and almost whistled. 

“I pray to God you made a killing last night, otherwise I'll have to answer to your father.” 

“I never lose, Pro.” 

“Does your father approve?”

“I deprived him of the possibility of disapproval. I've paid my way since high school.” 

Weekends, I made a living as a bartender all through college. Then I became a chef, then a caterer; moreover, I had poker. I rented a flat myself and did not live on campus, even though my father paid for my tuition at the University of Columbia. And even that money I gave my word to repay.

“You shall get a proper sleep,” Signora Anella joined. 

“Tonight I swear no poker, no drinking. I’ll clean up, and after dinner we will all watch TV and play canasta, like old folks in Little Italy,” I said. “But first, I need to see Milani for a short while. But tonight, I promise, I'll be the best-behaved boy on the whole Riviera.” 

I jogged to B. and bought a huge flower bouquet for the hostess. After lunch I took a nap — the first, and last, during my entire stay at the villa. But thoughts about Elio didn’t let me go. I was worried by his state; I still seemed to scent his smell, hear his voice, sense his presence, feel his touches. 

As promised, that night we all sat down — there were no guests — and watched television romances. The best part was how everyone, including Vimini, who wandered in, and Mafalda, who had her "seat" near the door of the living room, talked back to every scene, predicted its end, by turns outraged by and derisive of the stupidity of the story, the actors, the characters. My mother called, as she often did it. The laughter she heard from the phone piqued her interest. 

“Do you have a company there?” she asked. “Girls?” 

“The only girl here is ten years old, mom,” I answered, sneering. 

We went to bed with the sun. 

The next day I finally had some time to think about it. Did we need to bring back our association that has become fragile as never before, or was it better to ignore Elio in the same way he ignored me during breakfast? No chats as from now on they would inevitably bring embarrassment? Nevertheless, it wouldn't go unnoticed and people would start questioning. Or shall I pretend that nothing happened? But we both knew it did. Exclude certain subjects from our conversations? I didn’t believe this method would bring success, at least in the long run, but it was worth trying. 

Fourteen days, fourteen… Is it much, is it little, is it enough? 

When Elio came down, breakfast was already being cleaned from the table; I was lying on the grass hard at work. 

“I waited for you the other night,” I suddenly heard him speak. I raised my head in surprise: it was as if a grumpy wife bawled down upon her husband who had wandered somewhere. On the berm, I made it quite clear to him that I saw through his act. Did this mean Elio decided to become straightforward instead of twisting around and hiding? I could be straightforward, evasive or polite – I could be anything. 

“Why didn’t you come into town too? You could have a nice time” I answered calmly. “Did you rest at least?” 

“In a way.” 

I plunged into the manuscript, pretending to focus on it.

“Do you need to go into town this morning?” 

“Later, maybe.”

Elio should have taken the hint, and he did, but he surprised me again by refusing to retreat. 

“I was going to head into town myself. A book I ordered has finally arrived. It was just that I was hoping we'd go together.” 

No more beating around the bush. It’s been a while since I was in the position of the attacked. I was used to being the attacker myself. Well, okay then…  
“You mean like the other day?” I asked softly. 

“I don’t think we’ll ever do anything like that…” he began boldly, but slowed down immediately and finished: “But yes, like that.” 

His embarrassment was so visible that I couldn’t understand why he was so stubborn. 

“Do you like me that much, Elio?” 

Candidness shall know its boundaries, and this was a sucker punch. Any person, especially an embarrassed teenager, would have answered no. I would have given such an answer when I was Elio’s age or a bit younger. 

“Do I like you, Oliver? I worship you.” 

This word startled me, as if he slapped me in the face so that it might be instantly followed by passionate kisses. He sent everything I was thinking of him to hell once again. 

“I’ll go with you to B.,” I said. “But no speeches.” 

“No speeches,” he agreed. 

The trip was… tormenting. We drove silently on the road through the field, silently through the grove, through the red-hot desert of alienation. And we were constantly surrounded by the singing of birds; summer odors were still thick all around us, and we… we kept silent – on the piazzetta, drinking coffee and waiting for the bookshop to open. Our mutual hush used to be cozy; now it was exhausting. Elio’s confession changed our relations elusively. They did not become more precautionary or simpler like they could, but in his words, in every movement, I was trying to see the second meaning, a message addressed solely to me. And the more I watched him, the more it seemed to me that he was secretly watching me in return. 

Or did he really?

Elio stared at the war memorial; I looking out at the view of the speckling bay, neither of us saying a word about Shelley. But we were both thinking about him; I realized it when I involuntarily spoke my thoughts, wondering how anyone could drown in such a sea, and that instantly brought complicit smiles to our faces. 

The bookseller had ordered two copies of Stendhal’s Armance, one in paperback edition, the other an expensive hardbound. Elio asked for a pen, opened up the hardbound edition and wrote: “Zwischen Immer und Nie, for you in silence, somewhere in Italy, in the mid-eighties”. This book and the postcard I took without asking are everything I have from that summer. Now I know: between _Immer_ and _Nie_ there may be a moment – or a whole life. 

Painfully, oh, how painfully…

The rope on which we were balancing still held somehow, but I lost my peace. In addition, an anticyclone came; the nights became too hot, and the smell of citronella was stunning. It was impossible to sleep or read – only stare at the sea; and I couldn’t make myself go to bed. Knowing that Elio was near, in his bed, I opened green shutters of the French window – old hinges creaked treacherously – and went to the balcony with only my underpants on. This balcony and our rooms were the center of our intimacy, the world belonging only to the two of us. Did he hear me? Did he notice I merely tasted the wine at the table, but stopped drinking it? I had been long drunk – with the curls of dark hair, patches of sunlight on the fair skin, dreams of the ripe fig lips tasting like wild honey and my insane thirst. I was afraid to become a sleepwalker and, driven only by my uncontrolled desire, just enter his room once. I would lie down next to him, pull him closer and shut his surprised exclamations with a kiss. And to hell with everything that may come later. Sex is an integral and important part of a relationship, but not the main one. Anyway, the personality of a man comes to the forefront, and the ghost of this personality haunted me in the night so much that I even talked to it. 

I went so far that I feared to look Elio in the eye. Regardless of the heat, I was trying to work in my room. Like a thief, I sneaked on my tiptoes, leaving the house in the evening. And only Vimini was a ray of light, my Virgil in this Inferno. If not for our friendship, I would have broken down, left the professor’s house and, if pressed, explained why.

In a couple of days, Elio disappeared for a night walk and came back only by the morning. I realized where he had been and what he had been doing by a single triumphant look thrown at me. Coming back from the morning jog, I found a note under my door. 

“Сan’t stand the silence. I need to speak to you.”

Gods, great and small, can you explain why you let us play THIS kind of games?! 

Twelve days.

I either leave right now or agree. A half-measured decision would put aside the inevitable for a day or two, but not more. 

I had several chances to put an obstacle in the way of desire pushing us towards each other, but the means chosen by me for that were similar to the attempts to ascend Escher’s impossible stairs. Later I asked myself why I didn’t sever our ties at least after the note. Why didn’t I leave, run away? And here is the only answer I found – I closed my eyes to everything and decided to love because I couldn’t dare to decide otherwise. Another choice would have sent me to a far worse hell. 

I say it again: however Elio worshiped me, I never wore a halo of holiness; not then, not later. 

“Grow up. I`ll see you at midnight.” That’s what I added. 

All day, all fifteen hours were filled with languor and anxiety. Time was creeping unbearably slowly, and it seemed to me many times that all the clocks in the house were broken. I wouldn’t be able to bear it, staying in the house, and I ran away again. I was on the berm, gathering my courage, swam in the sea for a long time and lost a lot of money at the poker table for the first time. By the evening my nerves were so frayed that I realized I needed something to prevent me from going loose ahead of the time. Therefore, I got weed – not much, just for one reefer. 

I came back by lunch and took my usual place next to Elio. He tried to start a conversation several times, but I knew if I spoke, my voice would have betrayed me, so I limited myself to short _yes_ , _no_ and _I don’t know_. Then I went up and locked myself in my room. I saw Elio and Marcia play tennis on the court. Everything could snap in a flash – I could get all I`ve ever dreamed about, or get nothing at all. Elio could change his mind or get frightened at the last moment, and I recognized his right for either of these options. Rationally I knew he wanted, speaking in Biblical terms, to behold me, and behold him through that. Only ten days ago a thought of becoming a sex test site for him irritated me; now it was turning me on. 

I have no idea how the impressible hosts failed to notice the level of passion between us. They were probably distracted by the guests who arrived for dinner - a semi-employed adjunct professor of music and a gay couple from Chicago who insisted on speaking terrible Italian. I heard the professor reprimanding Elio, ordering him to behave as a civilized person. Sure there was anarchy in the professor’s house, but whenever necessary he resorted to the authoritative tone of a head of the family without thinking. If my father used such power as selectively it would have helped us avoid many problems… The guests looked like twins in their identical defiantly purple shirts and brought identical white bouquets. Being half-gay myself (it sounds funny if you think about it), I couldn’t imagine that I would ever behave so obnoxiously, even if I ever came out of the closet. 

I was sitting on the bed in the dark and smoking, listening to them talking and giggling somewhere in the distance and to Elio’s footsteps behind the wall. Will he come? The weed got me under a state of timelessness and euphoria, and I didn’t watch the clock at all. The knock on the glazed door that I had locked firmly for a clearly explainable precaution startled me. He came.

Who was more nervous? I thought it was me; Elio apparently thought it was him. I readjusted the pillows; he clearly didn’t know what to do with his hands, but a blunt of marijuana helped with that. And then we just let go. I was no longer afraid of a rejection, he – of a humiliation. The only thing I feared was to do something wrong, to rush and spoil everything. 

Our bodies hid almost nothing from each other, thanks to wet swimming trunks and the habit of wearing no shirts, but now we were again – oh God! – getting closer to each other step by step. Touch my foot? Here you go. Hug me? Be my guest. I was intentionally trying to get him to call all the moves, telling myself to keep from rushing forward, to let it go another way until it was too late. And only when he stroke my body with his hands and put them under my loose shirt, I gave up. I had to say something aloud. 

“You sure you want this?”

He nodded.

I embraced his face with both hands and looked closer. It was excited and filled with the most beautiful blush I’ve ever seen, his lips opened invitingly; our faces were so close that his warm breath was settling on my lips. Elio turned me on because he was born to do so. He probably didn’t realize it yet. A strange fire was lighting up in his eyes. I saw boldness in them, and I saw a longing for brotherhood and coupling. It was the first time I came so close to understanding how true he was when he said, _I worship you_ , because he looked at me how others look at the God or the sun - admiringly, risking going blind, but still looking. I couldn’t get it. Where did this easily hurt young man, full of hesitation and fears, found the courage to come to my bed? I thought for a second whether too much depended on me now. Maybe it was me who needed to retreat – for his good.

“We haven’t talk,” I said hoarsely. 

He shrugged his shoulders. About what? Why? It was too late. We both knew we`d already erased the red lines. I had no right to reject him. 

“Can I kiss you?”

He bluntly covered my lips with his; I grabbed at his back and – finally! – pulled him close and answered with full passion, as I’d been dreaming for a long time. 

I’m not a neat freak, and my bed at that moment resembled more a work table than a sleeping place. Translation pages, notes, maps and books covered the entire footboard. To kiss me Elio stood on his knees facing me and ruthlessly throwing it all away with his legs and making a mess of my work, but I didn’t care as long as he wanted ma THIS much. 

I tore off his T-shirt with a one move; he reached for the buttons on my shirt, and his fingers were visibly trembling. 

“Wait, let’s make it simpler, like that,” I whispered right into Elio’s lips and put his hands on my sides. He understood and took my shirt off like I did with his T-shirt – over the head. At some point, we both appeared to be completely naked, though I couldn’t say who or when took of his or mine shorts and underwear. 

Even now, sitting alone with only a pen and paper, I can’t touch upon the details of that amazing night, even though each minute of it is engraved on my memory forever. When you get to the level of desire I got to, when you feel so much that it seems it would be better not to feel at all, it is difficult to stick to some moral rules: you value any manifestation of this desire, even though you used to imagine everything differently. We almost didn’t speak; besides, two people barely need words in bed. Everything is told in touches. A greedy kiss – I want you! A moan, a bite in the neck in return – so do I! Long-expected feeling of another’s skin under the hands, a satisfied exhalation – finally! Hands down the spine, enjoying the protruding vertebrae – mine! Careful invasion of fingers into the groove between the buttocks – is it what you want? An impatient movement backward – it is! Nails piercing the shoulder – hurts! Tenderness of lips trying to apologize for the torture – I know, shall I stop? A pause, palms relaxing – no. The growing rhythm, causing roar in the ears – I won’t let go now! Heel hitting on the thigh – don’t! More! And there are only two exceptions in this hot wordlessness - the names exhaled at the peak of pleasure. 

That night I got an unfamiliar feeling of something that came right from the heaven, as if a half of me, rejected once, finally returned and merged with me, as if we were united by my blood that had earlier known a part of itself in his blood. I can’t explain it more clearly. Elio's hands trembled as much as mine, on which I leaned, and the sobbing coming from his lips duplicated exactly the one coming from mine; the sweat and semen covering our bodies were common, and I, feeling as if he became me, and I became him, asked him: “Call me by your name, and I`ll call you by mine”, and it became so… 

I didn’t foresee then – and it’s good that I didn’t – the price I would pay for this. We both would. There are a lot of minutes of unrivaled happiness and minutes of black melancholy in my life, and I owe Elio for the strongest sensation of both. 

It was probably half an hour before we restored our breath and started to comprehend anything. 

“Had we made noise?”

“No,” I smiled. “There is nothing to worry about.”

I picked the first thing I found to clean us both. It appeared to be my shirt. Elio followed it with his eyes, when I finished and threw the shirt on the floor. 

“Mafalda always looks for signs.” 

“She won’t find any, I’ll think of something,” I reassured him. 

“I call this shirt _Billowy_.” Elio, still quiet, started moving, pulling some book from under him, and put his head on my shoulder. “You wore it when you arrived.”

“Do you remember?”

“I remember everything. It is you for me.”

I pulled him to me, feeling aroused again, but this time we made it without penetration. Then I dozed for a bit and woke up as if from a push. The first pre-dawn rays were painting the room pink, covering the surrounding mess with a veil. But why did I wake up? I looked at Elio. His head was still resting on my hand; his lips were sealed tight, his eyes were open and… avoided my look. My heart sank from a bad feeling. 

“What’s wrong?”

He shrugged his shoulders and frowned. I suddenly remembered how I let myself loose at night. It was typical of me - I could hold myself back, but after getting what I had been depriving myself of, I could totally lose self-control. Did I… This thought made everything inside me turn upside down. 

“Does it hurt?”

He just shrugged his shoulders again.

“I knew we shouldn’t have done it. I knew it,” I burst out. “We had to talk…” 

“Probably,” he said coolly, looking as if he was about to throw up. I couldn’t bear seeing it. 

“Get some sleep. You need to have a rest,” I advised for the sake of saying something. 

He threw his arm awkwardly over my chest and closed his eyes. I don’t know whether he fell asleep; it was probably much later, just like with me. 

A new day was starting outside, but my soul was shadowed by the darkness of the eternal night. My worst fears turned out to be true: Elio tried and didn’t like it, and he was now possessed by disgust and some kind of remorse. 

I had virgins of both sexes in my bed before, but no one felt anything like that. Or - to be more precise - at least no one gave me the chance to notice that. And on the morning of that day, the eleventh of the days remaining before my departure, I lost myself completely, not understanding what to say or do and how to help. I even had no right to leave, not now. I needed to stay close as long as Elio wanted this until everything would come together somehow. A bit more and I would have fallen into the abyss of empty regrets after him. 

“I’ll think about it later,” I bitterly smiled to myself. 

After waking up in a couple of hours, we went swimming, and I tried not to think that it could be the last time we were so close to each other. I put on _Billowy_ and entered into the water in it, intending to call it an accident. You know, the wave was too high… We swam to the large stone together. Elio was trying to show that he made peace with what happened and was happy to be near me. “It is done, and there’s no fixing it,” as they say in Turkey when they execute the wrong man. But I noticed him turn away and rinse his mouth, fiercely rub his chest on which I came last night. I immediately remembered his face at the moment of ecstasy, but I firmly slapped myself mentally: everything was already too bad to make myself look like a lusty stallion. 

The only positive side of that morning was that we hadn’t talked so openly and carelessly for a long time. We didn’t touch upon the events of the night; instead, we talked about Haydn’s “Farewell Symphony”, the arrangement of which he had just finished. He could talk endlessly about Haydn. And yet I interrupted him at some point. 

“Is everything fine?” 

“Everything is wonderful.”

“Everything at all? I mean…”

“I know what you mean. Sore. It will pass.”

“Were you really okay with it when I..?” 

He turned away and shivered, as if the morning breeze blew cold at him. It was actually hot, and the stem of a thermometer was going to climb an unprecedented height again in the afternoon. 

“Do we have to talk about it?” His voice was soaked in irritation. 

“No, if you don’t want to.” 

While we were swimming back I asked what interested me a lot. 

“Are you going to use the last night against me?” 

I’ve never took Elio for a vindictive type before, but he was trying to hide his state and thoughts from me so carefully that suspicions arose in me against my own will. 

“No,” the answer was too quick; he had already been thinking about it. “I want to sleep the whole day. I’m terribly exhausted.” 

And only when following him up the stairs on our balcony I started to understand what a stupid thing I did. 

How could I be so unbearably dumb to say “We shouldn’t have done that?” Elio was drowning in the swamp of self-loathing like a child – and he was a child in a sense, simple-minded and inexperienced, blaming himself for the family troubles, and I was finishing him off instead of giving him a hand. I wanted to bang my head against the wall, and I would if I hadn’t had to explain myself to its inhabitants. “Congratulations, Oliver!” I told myself ironically. “There’s hardly a bigger idiot in all of New England.”

I tried to remember whether I felt something like that. There was awkwardness, physical discomfort, but no feeling of guilt or disgust. Maybe my lover appeared to be more cautious or caring than I am now. “No, you blind man!” I exclaimed. “You fail to understand that Elio overcame the path that took you several months in a single leap!” And it was true - by the time of my first intercourse with penetration I’d tried a lot of things, slowly getting used to it, but he didn’t have the time "to get used to it". And it was a logical outcome – he was probably transferring the disgust for some kind of our relationships he couldn't foresee to the relationships themselves and to him as its participant. The fact that he felt the same disgust for me worried me the least. I had to get him out of his self-made swamp. He must not hate himself; I will never forgive myself for it. 

My thoughts were racing feverishly, looking for a way out. If I’m right… If I’m right, then without losing a single second, I have to awaken an equally strong emotion of the opposite direction. Elio was so young he didn't have the capacity to love and hate simultaneously.

When we climbed the balcony, I followed him into his room and ordered calmly: 

“Take your trunks off.”

He was puzzled, but obeyed, getting more and more anxious.

“Sit down,” I dragged his hands down, kneeling. 

As soon as he sat on the bed, I swallowed his cock to the root and triumphantly felt it harden. I wasn’t going to finish it. Stroking the head with my tongue I stood up licked my lips with gusto, pushed Elio’s head back and kissed his lips. The entire world’s astonishment was shimmering in his widely open eyes with enlarged pupils.

“We’ll surely get back to it later,” I said and left the bedroom. The treatment began.

The next step was suggested by his affection towards _Billowy_. I stole the trunks that he wore when swimming that morning, put them on and came for breakfast like that. No one would have noticed it, as bikinis and trunks always changed hosts in the house. Elio was thinner than me, and his trunks were so tight it was possible to identify my religion even if I hadn’t had the Star of David on my neck. It turned me on incredibly, and Elio too, judging by the fire in his eyes. At the table, I decided to sit at his side, and when no one was looking my foot slid not over, but under his foot. I wasn’t going to let Elio forget; on the contrary, I was trying to show that in spite of everything we did at night, or rather due to it, I wanted him madly. 

Nevertheless, after breakfast I let him go to sleep freely. I was afraid to become too intrusive and push him away even more, so I went to town alone. I bought a newspaper and was standing in the doorway of the post office when Elio appeared near me, as if out of nowhere.

“Something happened?" I asked immediately. 

“I just had to see you.”

I probably had that kind of face that he added immediately: 

“If you want, I'll go back now.”

And I stood rooted to the spot, holding letters in my hand and watching him. Simply standing and watching, asking myself whether I got it right, and then I shook my head. 

“Do you have any idea how glad I am we slept together?” 

He shrugged his shoulder. 

“No.”

“I don’t believe it,” I came even closer and lowered my voice. “But I just dread the thought of having messed you up. I don’t want you or me, don’t want us to have to pay one way or another.”

“I'm not telling anyone. There won't be any trouble.” 

I wasn’t talking about that. Standing in the middle of this square in bright daylight that wouldn’t let us hide anything under the night veil of sentimentality, I realized clearly - for both of us it stopped being fun and games, which it could be in the beginning, and became something else. I didn’t want to mess up his life. 

“Are you sorry I came?” Elio asked dispiritedly. 

“I`d hold you and kiss you if I could.” 

“Me too.” And bending to my ear he whispered: “Fuck me, Elio.” 

A hot wave washed over me from head to toes. I looked into his eyes and stopped torturing myself with doubts – simply because I believed what I saw. 

“You’re revealing as much as never before.” 

“If you think THESE are revelations, I will disappoint you.” God, where did these velvet notes in the voice that was boyish yesterday come from? “It would be revealing if I said what exactly I imagine when I look at your mouth, of the pleasure I would again…” 

“Shut up!” I hissed, grabbing his shoulder and shaking lightly. “I would gladly pay you back in the same way and tell what I would do to you, pressing you right against this wall!” 

“So why wouldn’t you tell?” 

“I can’t even think about it; otherwise I would just break down and attack you. And you’ve already recently suffered from my impatience.” 

“If only you knew what plans of revenge I cherish…”

“We should surely get back to them later.” 

Elio quickly touched his cheek to my hand, which was lying comfortably on his shoulder, turned around, climbed on the bike and rushed down the hill. 

I followed him with my eyes and smiled contentedly – the trick worked; Elio would never realize that I just made him say that, pushed him in the right direction. Of course, I imagined how the situation could play out if things went wrong and I had to swallow my pride. It wasn’t worth Elio’s suffering, and he would definitely sooner or later feel like a humiliated asker, dreaming of being on top. I was ready for more than that; if he wanted to cut off my right arm, I would have agreed without thinking. 

And the next night I gave myself over to him, letting him lead, and letting myself… just be, probably. Without fearing, without remembering, without faltering. He hesitated instead of me and did everything slowly, and I smiled, hiding my burning face in the crook of my elbow. I selected such а position on purpose, as if he noticed my smile he could take it personally, feel hurt or just get lost. As a matter of fact, I was smiling because I knew that hate and disgust would finally leave Elio, he wouldn’t remember about them, and all fears would be gone like nightmares fleeing from the morning cries of roosters. It was worth it, worth it, worth it…

“Don’t regret anything, Elio, please,” I begged silently. “Don’t make me live through that torment again, don’t deny these wonderful moments, slicing them out from your memory.” 

*****

The longer we resisted the inevitable, the faster and deeper was the fall; and the more we rejected the passion before, the more it drew power from us for its existence now. We hardly slept for more than four hours of the ten we spent in bed, and hardly parted for more than two hours of the fourteen we were awake. 

From Sicily, I brought a jar of local honey, collected by bees in the foothills of Etna. I liked its unusual smell and a hint of thyme. I was going to present the jar to Rachel, who adored thyme, but it didn’t last that long. We used to grab something from the kitchen to have a snack in my/his room - a terrific appetite woke up after lovemaking. Fruits, cookies, biscuits, nuts, fresh buns – everything was good. We fed each other, dipping pieces into honey, and it was nearly dripping on bed sheets and pillows all the time. If we managed, we put our hands to catch sweet sunny drops; if not, it ended up on our chests or faces. 

“What does the inscription on the doors of Pompeii’s tavern say?” Elio asked, laughing, trying to wipe the honey stains from my collarbone and ending with licking it zealously. 

“Lovers are like bees in that they live a honeyed life.” 

We floundered in that honey up to our heads; it was impossible to separate us, as if we were glued to each other. When professor and I worked in his study Elio would perch on the big armchair with his feet and listen, interrupting us occasionally. He played for me in the evening – I sat nearby on the bench or a sofa and drifted away on the waves of his music. We could be occasionally found in the living room: I was correcting the translation, and Elio – notes, sitting on the pillows by my feet. We swam at dawn, had slow breakfasts, rode to the city, helped Anchise in the garden from time to time, had lunches, lay sleepily in bed, spending the siesta there, played tennis sometimes, sat outside on the piazzetta in the evenings and made love every day and every night. 

If I wasn’t wary of the excessive pathos, I would have said that we were having a honeymoon (in all meanings), deserving its name much more than everything that people usually mean by it. And I had a chance to compare later… 

We both were not older than eighteen, and what we did was real madness. 

A flash memory: I walked Vimini home after she came to dinner with us, and upon my return, I found Elio in my bed. He lay with his head on his hand, clearly naked, barely covered with a bed sheet. A plate of apricots sat nearby, and beautiful graceful fingers of a natural musician, gifted to send me straight to heaven with a single touch, were caressing one of the fruits. I closed the door and leaned against it with my hands crossed, raising my eyebrow in a question. 

“Surprise!”

“I see.”

“Do you want to… taste it?”

He bit it gently, not even bit, but slightly licked the apricot along the _dimple_. If I needed a catalyst capable of turning my completely innocuous nature into an explosive substance, it was exactly a gesture of this kind. I grabbed the doorpost and accidentally pressed the switch. The ceiling light lit up; Elio dropped the apricot from the surprise, and the plate fell down. I turned off the light. Then turned it on and off again out of pure mischief. 

“Stop it, or they’ll get it wrong!” 

“And what can they get wrong?” 

“You press it so rhythmically… one can think…” 

Elio bit his tongue, but I had already caught this charming ambiguity. A game for two. 

“That you pressed my butt against this switch?” I wondered innocently, setting a rhythm. 

“Oliver!”

Elio, forgetting about the apricots rolling on the floor and bed, raised himself on one elbow and looked at me, stunned. I was dreamily caressing the key. The switch was round, with an extended button in the center – well… 

“Do you like it?”

“Stop it!”

As if! I closed my eyes languidly, continuing to watch him greedily looking at my fingers that were shamelessly caressing the unaware switch. 

Catching the movement of his hand clasping the bed sheet and clearly ready to throw it away, I left the key alone. 

“I’m going to take a shower. Don’t you dare start without me!” 

We had no soldiers in our family, but if there were some, I wouldn’t have shamed them with the speed of bathing. When I returned, I found Elio in the same inviting pose. I leaned over him and started to take off the sheet, sliding over his body with my lips, kissing and biting him here and there. For a time he tried to look offended, teasing me, but then gave up, clasped me in his arms and threw me on the bed. His body was awkward only at first glance: young, flexible, it wound around me like a vine, and there was no way I could tear myself away from it. Sometimes I thought that I was ready to kiss him forever – I’ve never felt this heady delight when literally every touch makes something echo with an impossible sweetness not just in the groin, but also in the middle of the chest. 

When Elio decided to fertilize one of Anchise’s peaches, I said jokingly that next would come minerals. And what do you think? He became suspiciously thoughtful, and then, a few days later, dragged me to Monet’s berm. We already had a picnic there and vowed not to make love, the better to enjoy lying in bed together the same afternoon. “What does Elio want from me now?” I asked myself. 

“Let’s go, I’ll show you something,” he said. We took bikes and got to the berm in ten minutes. The sky was moonless, and the dome was illuminated only by flickering stars. Elio took off his sneakers, grabbed my hand and rushed down the hill with a scream. 

Such an inexpressible feeling - to run to the edge of the terrace, barely touching the slippery with dew grass with your bare feet, and the edge merges with the sky, and it seems that in one step you’ll fly right there, to the stars. And call each other, as if afraid to get lost in this darkness, and awkwardly roll in the cool grass, adrenaline still buzzing in our ears, bodies still strained like a string… 

For some time, we lay and stared silently at the sky. Finally, the lost breath came back. 

“Do you often have such fun?” I asked.

“As soon as I have a chance, and the new moon comes,” his serious voice sounded unexpectedly close to my ear, and his breath touched my cheek. “Do you think that’s what I brought you here for?” 

I raised myself a bit. 

“Isn’t that?”

“I want to ask you something.” 

“Ask me what? Jump into the sea from the cliff?”

“No,” he suddenly leaned over me, and I saw his eyes shine in the dim starlight. “I want you to become mine. Here.” 

Something pricked my heart scarily and burningly. 

“Why?” I said quietly.

He leaned and kissed me so long and so languidly that my head started spinning. It was not the innocently testing kiss that we exchanged here the first time. It was a passionate, demanding kiss of someone who had gained experience, knew what was about to come and was ready for it. 

“I want this place where I came to be alone on summer after-noons would get to know you, judge you, see if you fitted in, and to let you in.” 

To keep me here.

There was a lump in my throat. I finally got it. We spoke openly about many things but never mentioned what was about to happen in four or five days. About my leaving. We weren’t counting our last days. 

“How did you know about such rituals?” I asked after a while, when we lay on the grass naked, lazily exchanging kisses. 

“I don’t remember. Maybe I read it from Hesiod or Herodotus, maybe I made it up myself. This is Italy; every stone here remembers the Olympians,” Elio rubbed the tip of his nose against mine. “Perhaps Antaeus got the power of Mother Gaia, not the way Pherecydus wrote about it. What’s wrong?” he responded to my sly laugh. “Judging by “Metamorphosis”, it would be just the easy bit!” 

We went back much slower, easily talking and holding hands. It felt good and even the inner voice of reason was silent and didn't comment on the unusual relaxedness. 

Our best moments were in the afternoon. The guests wandered off wherever they wanted; we went upstairs to doze before the coffee; the professor would either retire to his study or steal a nap with his wife. By two in the afternoon, an intense silence would settle over the house; it seemed as if the whole world had a rest too, and only the pigeons and Anchise could resist everything; every now and then we heard cooing or the knock of a hammer. I asked Elio not to close shutters and windows; only just the swelling sheer curtains between us, lying in the same bed, and the curious world. But no one except him and me ever was on the balcony, and Mafalda always entered the rooms from the hall to change blankets or call us for breakfast. It was a pure crime to block away so much sunlight and keep such a landscape from view, especially when you didn't have it all life long. When there’s no blinding sun, no fertile fields, no wind whipping waves on the crops, like on the sea, no creaking of the wooden floors or light scratching of a moved clay ashtray or a plate on the marble top of the bedside table. 

The spicy smell of our excitement, the pungent scent of sweat, the thick aroma of heated ground pouring from the garden, the stifling odor of chamomile powder Mafalda used for bedding. The sweet and peppery taste of lips. I wanted to drink this magical beverage with large sips, until it would stupefy me completely, until I forgot what and where I was, until there were just the two of us – one blood, one heart, one body for two. 

I look back on those days, and I cannot make myself regret anything. Only the thoughts of risk, of caution, of unwillingness to hurt Elio too much never left me, even though we weren’t guilty of the fact that people could, speaking figuratively, stone us. 

I remember how Elio found me by the sea at night, and how revealing it was for him to discover that I used to spend long hours there and not fucking everyone in the B. every night. 

“I never knew. I thought…”

“I know what you thought.”

Clinging to me, he softly and gently touched my neck with his lips. I glimpsed at the house that was barely visible through the foliage of trees: all the shutters were closed. I put my hand on his shoulder. It was rather friendly, if anyone saw. 

“Why here? Why not at home?” 

“Do you think it was easy for me to lie calmly in bed, knowing that you were behind the wall?” 

He was embarrassed; I understood it by the way he buried his forehead in my shoulder. 

“I dreamt of lying next to you, climbing naked under your blanket. Many times I wanted to enter your room without asking,” he confessed to my sweater. “And I did, when you weren’t there. Even now I don't dare say what I did there…” 

So this is why I was going crazy from his seeming presence in my room, in my bed?! 

“I can imagine,” I grinned. “You’ve made my sleep very restless.” 

“So did you.”

“But I didn’t do anything!”

“This is why… We wasted so many days… so many weeks.” 

“Wasted? I don't know. Perhaps we just needed time to figure out if this is what we wanted.” 

Silence.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I’m thinking how happy I was here, like I never before,” I answered. “I’m thinking that in two weeks I'll be back at Columbia.” 

“All this means is that in ten days when I look out to this spot, you won't be here,” Elio was still talking to my sweater. “I don’t know what I will do then. At least you will be elsewhere there are no memories.” 

I embraced him tighter.

“The way you think some¬times… Will you be okay?” 

“I'll be okay,” he repeated, and his hand slid into my pants. “I love being here with you.” 

He smiled, and I kissed his smile. 

*****

At breakfast, after the night I let Elio be on top, I found him cutting the top of my soft-boiled eggs before Mafalda intervened as usual or before I had smashed it with my spoon. I caught the professor staring at Elio, and only at that moment was thinking how it looked from an outside perspective. Domestic bliss. If there was a goose, it surely wasn’t my lover’s father. 

I warningly touched Elio’s foot with mine.

“Americans never know how to do it,” he explained belatedly. 

“Better keep a low profile,” I advised a bit later. 

Marcia called very conveniently, and I winked at Elio and passed the phone to him. I knew that they were seeing each other, as they say now, but I wasn’t lamented by jealousy. We were not written for one instrument alone; I was not, neither was he. 

*****

Remembering the experience of my own growing up, I had no doubt Professor Perlman wouldn’t be happy if his son had an experience of homosexual relationship, and it would end badly for Elio. This is not to mention me. 

I thought a lot about it and asked Elio directly in the evening. 

“If your father finds out about us, what will he do? Will he object? Will he lock you?” 

“My father would never object.” He was speaking very confidently. “He might make a face at first, then take it back. Mafalda, she'd leave the house.”

Once, when I came everywhere with Chiara, we met Elio in the café where everyone dropped by during the night between cinema and dancing. 

“What are you doing here?” I asked, rather awkwardly trying to hide the coldness that I had set myself from Chiara. She's already been asking too many questions that evening. 

“Hanging out.”

“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” I wondered caringly. 

“My father doesn't believe in bedtimes," he parried.

A smirk hovered on Chiara’s face; she was about to say something cruel. 

“Never a bedtime in their house, no rules, no supervision. At all! Don't you see? His father never forbids him anything, and he never will. That's why he's such a well-behaved boy. Nothing to rebel against. ” 

“Is that true?” I asked. 

“I suppose, we all have our ways of rebelling if we want to,” Elio answered, shrugging his shoulders. 

As for me, I rebelled for real only once, when I was insisting on what I was going to do after high school: from my parents' point of view ancient culture was something covered with sands of time; a worthy son would not be engaged in such an impractical thing instead of stable, reliable job. Other reasons seemed insignificant to me to stand against my authoritative father, and I either obeyed or looked for a way to turn the situation to my own good. 

“Name one,” chimed in Chiara. 

“You won’t understand.”

“He reads Paul Celan,” I broke in. “And Omar Khayyam.” 

“ _E chi è?_ ” Chiara wondered. Apparently, she never heard of any of them. 

Elio shot me a complicit glance and I understood my mistake instantly. 

“Poets,” I explained, taking her away to another café before he could say anything fatal. “Well, _Later!_ ” 

Remembering this conversation, I was happy for Elio and put the story on the furthest shelf of my consciousness, where I kept my own memories. 

My romantic affairs started with girls when I was about fourteen. With a proviso: in our circle, there was a clear distinction between those with whom it was possible to have sex and those whom people marry in the end. However, by fifteen I suddenly realized that my heart was racing madly when Seb, the captain of our football team, addressed me, or when Mr. Jameson, our history teacher, put his hand on my shoulder, praising me for a good essay. I realized it, and I got scared. I was a average shy teenager back then, shyer than many, and I had no courage to talk to my parents. They didn’t talk to me about sex, but it didn’t stop me from adopting a common image of such relationship as a dirty and disgusting one. I didn’t want to become dirty and disgusting. But as boys didn’t give me any other looks except for friendly, and looked through me rather than at me, as if I was a little boy, I settled down. The fire that would later burn bright was still smoldering somewhere deep without showing itself. 

Once, when sitting in a park and treating myself to an ice cream, I saw two men sitting down on the next bench. They were talking quietly and laughing. I don’t know whether it was that forbidden fire, or I was subconsciously looking for something to help me sort out my own feelings, but I felt, I knew, - those two were exactly a couple. The way their hands touched, as if randomly. The way they exchanged quick smiles – as if they did not need word to say something. The atmosphere that surrounded them – too sensual, too sharp, too bright. A colored smear of paint on the gray, faceless background. How would it look, I thought, if they let themselves be a bit more open? I was madly curious, and I started staring at them, charmed, afraid to look away and miss something intimate, something that was only about these two, that made them walk on a thin line. And suddenly the man who was facing me caught my look and smiled, making me understand that my interest has been noticed. I felt hot from the embarrassment. Suddenly I felt like a man who got caught peeping into someone else’s bedroom. I took a deep breath, trying to distance myself from what I just saw, and looked away. And only after glancing at them in a couple of minutes, I saw them leaving, covertly entwining their fingers. They looked back, as if having felt my greedy eyes; and the one that smiled at me before waved me goodbye. 

I didn’t see anything that I could condemn; that’s how I took it. Nothing seemed filthy or disgusting to me. The men were young and beautiful, and their manners weren’t actually different from the manners of my relatives and most people I knew. They were even better, those manners: my father, for example, would’ve never thought of smiling to strangers in the park. In his office, of course, he would have smiled to the Satan himself if he asked to find a warm place for a solid investment. 

However, I failed to realize the seriousness of the ban regarding loving boys until I fell in love with one. It started with a fellowship that grew into close friendship, and we both understood that something greater was on the horizon, but we weren’t destined to live our love to the end. 

Seb was so lucky that his eighteenth birthday, like any other of his birthdays, happened during summer vacation. I prepared a gift and was going to meet him after lunch. Mom and dad were still at the table; I kissed mother on the cheek, and she wished me a good evening. 

“I hope there won’t be any alcohol,” my father added strictly. 

I had a passing thought that the presence of my friend replaced even champagne for me, but I reassured him that we wouldn’t even drink beer. 

I called a cab in advance; I didn’t want to use father’s chauffeured car, even though he offered me to do so. I didn’t go far: I searched my pockets and realized that I forgot the keys to the house. I wasn’t exactly pleased with the idea of telling my parents when I was going to come back; therefore, I gave the cabman a fiver and asked to stop and wait for me; then I rushed back home. Silently opening the rear door and crawling to the stairs, I suddenly heard my dad speaking. 

“I’m telling you, there’s something wrong! Haven’t you noticed that he only talks about him? Seb this and that, Seb writes such poems, Seb plays guitar so fine…”

Something creaked; muffled steps were heard.

“I’ve noticed. How could I not? But I don’t believe that our son is… one of those.” 

“I didn’t believe for a long time either, I hoped that I was mistaken.” Judging by the sound of it, my father collapsed on a chair. I froze behind the half-opened door of the dining room. The heartbeat was echoing in my ears so strongly that I hardly managed to single out words. “And I looked into his eyes today. They were shining so bright. There’s no mistake.”

A short pause. Then I heard my mother speak again. 

“So what do we do?”

“What do we do… I already called Dr. Savadge in the clinic. Unfortunately, he is away now, and I didn’t deem it necessary to disclose details to his deputy…” 

“Savadge?!” mother exclaimed. 

“Stop shouting so loud.” 

“You want to send your own son to the asylum? This punishment is too severe!” 

“I’m a father, not a punisher; I prevent and correct without punishing. Oliver can be cured, and this is what we should do. What do you suggest? Accept it?” 

“But we could talk to him, warn him, explain all the perniciousness…” 

“It’s good that you understand that this is perniciousness. Savadge will be back in three days; he will talk to Oliver like a professional. After that, I’ll talk to the father of this… of Sebastian.” 

“And what if it gets worse? What if…” I could hear my mother not daring to say what she was thinking. “What if we will end up with no son at all?”

“It’s better to have no son at all than a son like this.” 

“Michael!”

I stopped listening. I rushed headlong upstairs, grabbed my keys from the dresser and jumped from the window of my room on the garage roof, and then on the ground. I was shaking so much that whether I was going to crash seemed nothing compared to the necessity to descend the stairs and walk past that bloody door again.

The name of Doctor Savadge was not unfamiliar to me. His clinic was nearby, and there were all kinds of rumors about it. People used to talk about hypnosis, mind-killing drugs, and even electroshock treatment. The doctor himself, as I found out later, was a student and a follower of the notorious Charles W. Socarides. I couldn’t even think of my father handing me over to this monster. Just the thought that I would have to turn my soul inside out terrified me. And the same could happen to Seb. 

Sitting back in the cab, I felt the sweat rolling down my body, and my face was burning with shame and rage that I barely contained. Moreover, turning clumsily, I understood that I tore my jacket at the seam. I couldn’t go to the party looking like that. 

Until that moment, and I was sixteen and a half, I had never thought that the parental love had its limits. I always got what I wanted, just like Rachel. My father relieved me of the problems with the police and the owner of the café, when my friend and I crashed under its shed on a motorcycle (even though I got a harsh blamestorming at home afterwards). On the other hand, I understood that my father was a very authoritative person. He would do as he said, I had no doubt: he was as hard as a stone in what he deemed right. However strongly my mother protected me, she would give up quickly, and I knew that too. I needed to think about how to protect myself for now and for future. And I came to the one I always asked for support and advice – to my grandfather. 

It was not that I was going to tell him the whole truth. I couldn’t admit that I've overheard their conversation, since I would have to confess why it scared me so much. Grandfather could have figured things out easily, and I wasn’t sure he would support me and not my father. I couldn’t take such risks. I just had to wait somewhere and think it over. I called Seb and made up something about a sudden illness of a relative. I told grandfather that I got into a fight because of a girl. He reacted with understanding.

“Well, the Viking got angry,” he snorted, giving my jacket to the housekeeper to fix it. “But you shall not worry too much. You have to fight for those you like. I hope you’re not going to retreat?” 

I wasn’t going to retreat in any sense.

A man has discovered only two ways to achieve the same goal: do not let the others know what you really are. Covertness and isolation or outright falseness. It was easier for my nature to take the first way and not say anything, but I was aware I was caught by indirect evidence. 

I’ll tell you what I came up with - thanks to books.

Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in. I shall have a whole crowd of friends and girlfriends, and then my little truth will drown in the sea of the falsehood of one degree or another. 

However, it was easier said than done. I had to fight my shyness and work on myself seriously to become someone who would fit this description. I couldn’t just come up and get acquainted with someone without trembling, for I was too afraid of a rejection. 

I’ve already mentioned my grandmother, Norwegian theatrical and cinema actress. My grandfather loved her very much, and even 12 years after the death of the spouse didn’t get married for the second time, regardless of the number of candidates and pleads of the family. I’ve asked myself many times: how he ever had the courage to come up to her. He wasn’t too handsome even in his youth and was on the short side; Grandma, on the opposite, was tall and beautiful and had an army of admirers. If I were in his place, I would have never come close to such a woman or would have started to stutter at the most inappropriate moment. On the other hand, the charm of the ones possessing moral strength makes the eye get used to flaws of such faces and sees only what is attractive in them; my grandfather had this kind of specific plainness. Just like my father, he belonged to the breed of people that preserve their dignity in any situation, and unlike others he could allow himself not to think about his facial expression, since it couldn’t get less beautiful. Money, by the way, apparently wasn’t my grandmother’s primary concern, as there were not just very rich, but also noble men among her admirers. And my grandfather pushed them all aside. Perhaps he had a special recipe? 

“I’m not sure whether you can call it a recipe,” my grandfather smiled a bit sadly, when I asked him this question under a specious excuse after dinner. He always enjoyed telling me about his wife. “I thought of investing in cinema business at the time and met up with a lot of those artsy people. You know, actors, directors, producers, and so on. This is the trick I’ve learned from the best actors. Just another trial, another role, you see? Just make the first step and you’ll be surprised how easy the second one will be.” 

I got it. They don’t reject you – they reject the mask you wear. Nothing personal. After having tried this recipe, I can now assure you that it works. For my entire life, I have been surrounded by girlfriends like a beehive is surrounded by bees. That’s the result.

I had to avoid Seb for two weeks to think about the new strategy and at the same time pull the wool over the eyes of my parents; however, when I explained everything to him, he got scared, and we broke up. I was expecting something like that, but it did indeed hurt me, I must admit. 

“So swallow all your tears, my love, and put on your new face.” Perhaps this was why I was so obsessed with this single by The Psychedelic Furs? 

*****

My mind occasionally tried to remind me that our hours were limited, but I rejected the kind advice and didn’t think about where it all was going. I breathed with all my chest, making provisions for the very long winter: dancing sparks of green and gold in his eyes, sensitive fingers of a musician, the skin, velvet-like and sweet like a peach, or smooth and salty like the sea, the narrow shoulders, the flexible back, the feet, charming in their everlasting nakedness, - this treasure was mine and mine alone. Elio could grow up, could step over it, miss me in the future or not, but it didn’t matter a thing to me anymore, because I felt that there and then I was living for real. 

Our madness reached its climax on that day, two days before my leaving, when the storm struck B. 

For several days, the thermometer remained at +37°C in the day and +32° in the night. The atmospheric pressure was rising. Electricity was accumulating in the stuffy air and making hairs on our bodies stand up; Mafalda predicted that it was going to end with a storm. 

“How it always happens,” the professor agreed. 

And once in the afternoon, I noticed dark low clouds far above the sea, at the very line of the horizon. The sun was still hot, but a light haze started to cover the sky. It seemed more and more over time that I was in Turkish baths. By the dinner, the clouds had already crawled up close; they were absolutely black, with bluish edges. Every now and then the blackness was illuminated with blue flashes; the sea was somber, blue and black with white inscriptions of foam. 

“Well,” the professor drawled. “Hide wherever you can. There’ll be a great doomsday.” 

We had dinner with Marcia’s family, I think; they hurried to return home before the thunder broke. We gathered in the living room, spoke quietly and waited. 

A fearsome, deadly white lightning blazed without warning. Everyone screamed; Mafalda dropped a pile of dessert plates. A powerful gust of wind, a deafening rumble of thunder, and the promised doomsday started. It seemed like the glasses broke in all the windows. B. was overcome with Egyptian darkness, but the lighting stroke every second, and in their glare, we saw the trees behind the window, bent by the wind like canes. The talks stopped. One could hardly hear his own thoughts in this rumble. 

“It’s bad that there’s no rain,” Elio said; he leaned to me under the blanket and shivered nervously after each rumble. “I hope Anchise’s barn won’t catch fire!” 

I squeezed his hand. Not even the strongest could stay calm during such raging of nature; no eyes could look indifferently at it. The fear and excitement tied everyone’s hand and foot. Mafalda was crossing herself quickly; I saw her lips moving, whispering a prayer.

Suddenly, Elio freed his hand and threw away the blanket. I wanted to shout: “Where are you going?” as he jumped to the piano. Following the powerful thunder, the chords of Gluck’s Dance of the Furies started to sound.

You can’t imagine what a concert it was! Elio had never played like that before; he seemed to challenge the wrath of God. Signora Annella, the professor, even Anchise, who held himself better than the others and picked shards from the floor, probably felt themselves as if in Hell. Not the hell pictured by Christianity, but the one where invisible and merciless Hades reigns, whose heart was touched only by Orpheus; not a beam of the life-giving light would enter his kingdom now. 

The “Dance” was not over yet when the hard rain finally started, and the winding flows, where white zigzags reflected and refracted, interweaving in bizarre patterns, ran down the windows. Elio stopped playing, inhaled deeply and threw his tangled bangs from his forehead. 

“Let’s go!” he said shortly and got up, giving me his hand.

I got out from under the blanket. I wasn’t fully in control of myself yet, and I didn’t understand a lot, but I realized one thing precisely: Elio stopped caring whether the others knew. 

We went up to the second floor, and he entered his room, saying: “I’ll come soon.” Stretching out on the bed, I was trying to organize my thoughts; however, the ongoing thunder and the drops rumbling on the balcony flooring were confusing my soul while my body kept on trembling at the sound of thunder. Unable to lie still and wait, I opened the glass doors and stepped under the rain. I got instantly wet from my head to toes; I threw my soaking shirt somewhere and leaned my hands against the handrail, breathing deeply and putting my face under the streams of water. 

Someone’s hands hugged my waist, someone’s hot body pressed against my back. I turned round. 

The first rapture was brought not by the touch of lips, but the fact that we moved towards each other – with the same desire, with the same power and passion. 

Elio, my Elio, the burning frost and the melting heat, tasting like the sweetness and freshness itself, with the bottomless darkness in his gaze. I closed my eyes, unable to take this look, and the feelings from the strong, slim body possessed me completely. 

My head was spinning; the lightning flickering over our heads seemed to penetrate through our bodies. Elio staggered for a moment, and I hugged him tightly and leaned against the balcony balustrade, even though my legs were also buckling. He unbuttoned my shorts; I, obeying this imperious gesture, pulled them down and threw them away with my leg. Without noticing the showering rain, we kissed on the balcony fervently. 

“Do you want them to see us?” I asked, checking my guess. As a matter of fact, hardly anyone could see us; only a madman would go out in such weather. 

“Let them see.” He raised his eyes to the sky for a second. 

“What if…” 

“Then both of us…” he whispered, leaning even stronger. “It would be better…” 

And to this day, whenever I’m in a thunderstorm, the phantom pain from the iron handrails cutting through my waist flashes through me, and the beads running down my face become sweet like honey and salty like tears. His or mine? Who cares…? 

We fell asleep only by the morning; Elio stayed in my bed. We overslept quite a bit, and this time we risked being caught sleeping together, but Mafalda, who was long tortured by the thunder, barely got up as well. The breakfast was fairly late, but no one, especially us, was against it. The sky was fully cleared, the air became fresher. The weather, as if apologizing for scaring us so much, was trying to erase everything reminding of the storm and gave us one of the most wonderful days of the summer season. But we knew: this was the impending separation giving us a sign.

*****

After the storm, we stopped thinking of what others could think of us. If the heavenly fire failed to incinerate us, people had no more power over Elio or me. It was as if something unanimated but powerful, like that storm, shielded and protected us. All the locks were reduced to dust; all the doors were clicking open one by one. 

I was leaving for the States the second week of August, but at first I decided to spend three days in Rome to see my Italian publisher and to work on the final draft of my manuscript, and then I'd fly directly home. 

“Would you like to join me?” 

“Yes.”

“Wouldn't you ask your parents first?” 

“No need, they never said no.” 

“Yes, but wouldn't they…” 

“They wouldn't.” 

Signora Annella asked whether Elio could accompany me, and helped her son pack. His father had booked us one of the most luxurious hotels in Rome.

“This is a gift,” he said.

When I was packing my suitcase, I took that postcard from the wall. It was the obvious choice - antique postcard of Monet's berm dating back to 1905 or so. The faded colored postcard had originally been mailed in 1914. It always would remind me of the morning when we first spoke out.

On the train, Elio told me about the day when they thought that I`d drowned. How he was determined to do the same thing to my body that Shelley’s friends did to his. 

“I would have grabbed Mafalda's knife from the kitchen and ripped out your heart.” 

“What would you have done with it?” 

“Who knows. Maybe I would have buried it in the _heaven_. Or, maybe, I would have poured poison over it, like the daughter of Tancred, Prince of Salerno, did.” 

Then I answered him like she did.

“Sojourn most sweet of all my joys, accursed be he by whose ruthless act I see thee with the bodily eye: 'twas enough that to the mind's eye thou wert hourly present.” 

“You heart was all I'd ever have to show for my life. A heart and _Billowy_.” 

It was probably the only sad note in the melody of our trip before we parted in Fiumicino. We were left to ourselves for three whole days, and I had never felt freer or safer in my life. No one knew Elio in the city, and only a few people knew me. I could pretend to be whoever I wanted, say anything and do everything. We`d slept almost all the way to Rome, and his head resting on my shoulder in full view of the other passengers. We had never taken a shower together and made love there, but now we did. We wore each other's clothes. We wore each other's underwear. I wanted to rub every old house, hug every man we met that looked at us with a benevolent smile. 

“Oliver, I’m happy,” Elio kept saying, and happiness lit up in his eyes with a green flash. Not just these eyes – everything around seemed to shine and sparkle, charming and exciting at the same time. 

Elio told me about a young man on a bicycle three years ago who tried to pick him up. He could have become his first lover. Perhaps, he would have made it easier for both of us, but against the voice of reason, I was grateful that everything happened as it did. That Elio was mine and only mine, as I was his and only his. 

"I turned down so many. Never went after anyone." 

"You went after me." 

"You let me!"

I smiled. Well, it was true.

Elio was planning to enter college in the States the following year, and we had talked about meeting there, and we had talked of writing and speaking by phone.

“You should come visit us for Christmas! Some of our former bo… former houseguests always come; it won’t be a surprise.” 

“I will, I will,” I was calming him down. “And the next summer you will already be in the States…” 

The miracles continued; we made plans, we dreamed. We ran away from the reality and stood back to back, so that it wouldn’t jump out from somewhere like a Corsican robber and take us by surprise. 

I took a minute to phone my parents and say when I was going to come back, sent Elio to the bar to get cigarettes, and then everything merged into some colorful and ringing symphony of people, poems, wine and excited exclamations. We went to a party organized by my publisher and felt like two magnets with opposite polarities for the whole evening. The bookstore was packed. The publisher was also there. The party was in honor of a poet, and he spoke about the Basilica of San Clemente. The city that is 28 centuries old has a lot of such buildings resembling icebergs. Buildings were erected and destroyed at the same place, burying their predecessors. This basilica was also built on the ruins of earlier temples – like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like any person. 

Who knows what is hidden inside us under the plunder of civilization, what wild desires walk secret paths and weep in long-sealed rooms. What impulses would have taken us if some archaeologist of the human soul reached that first foundation? And the search can go on and on… 

We sat on the stairs like hens on a roost, and I openly hugged Elio around the waist. Everyone looked at us and saw trough us, but it didn’t bother us at all. I was asking myself: will I be able to live without him? How will the emptiness in my bed feel? Whom else would I ever be able to call by my name? But then I shook my head: I knew that was never going to happen. My name already belonged to Elio.

Then the crowd took us to the supper; then we went somewhere to drink coffee, and then Elio felt sick. I’m not a babysitter to watch over him, but such a wild mixture of whiskey, wine, grappa, and gin would have knocked down anyone. Fortunately, he vomited, and cold water from the fountain helped him pull himself together. We wandered through the maze of silent and deserted streets for a long time. The moisture was in the air, and even the roadway cobblestones seemed oiled. Rome that survived Nero and barbarians, the dominion of popes and Mussolini looked down at us with its blinded lanterns. Today it gave itself to us – and to the stray cats meowing in the dark. 

Finally, we approached the Church of Santa Maria del Anima. A small square of the traffic light attached to the corner of a tiny, old building illuminated us dimly. Elio leaned against the wall and raised his dazzlingly shining eyes.

“The most beautiful day of my life and I end up throwing up.” 

Habitual associates are known to exercise a great influence over each other's minds and manners. Those whose actions are forever before our eyes, whose words are ever in our ears, will naturally lead us, albeit against our will, slowly, gradually, imperceptibly, perhaps, to act and speak as they do. I will not presume to say how far this irresistible power of assimilation extends; but it surely exists. Otherwise, I would have to assume that I contracted Elio’s recklessness, his bravery, and courage through sexual intercourse.

I’m saying this because self-control left me completely at that minute. I pressed him against the wall and started kissing him like a madman; he embraced my waist so tightly, as if he feared he'd fall at my feet, and answered me with the same passion. A bit more and I would have pressed him into the stones. It was 3:00 a.m. I think some late tourists or tramps passed by, muttering something disapproving. I couldn’t care less. If I could, I would have stayed like that forever. 

We took a long way to the hotel bed, through Piazza Navona, fountains, dawn and the singing of Neapolitan songs along with kisses. We went up the stairs, still kissing; our legs entwined, and we almost fell down. We didn’t want to talk. I used to think that I wanted Elio so strongly because I had to hold back. It seems like an eternity has passed since that time. So strongly, you say? Only now I understood how it was: to crave, to desire, to lust. Every morning that I woke up without him, every noon when I waited for him to come, every night when the rings of curtains tinkled faintly on the metal ledge, and I, driven by an unconscious fear, pulled him closer, taught me that it was possible to do it even stronger – unbearably strong, like now. 

He`s my destiny, my soul, _cor cordium_. Until the very end of me, until the very end of him.

Had this despair, this love lasted for another month, and our souls and bodies would turn to dust.


	3. Parallel lives

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank so much to everyone who has taken the time to leave kudos or - especially! - comment, it has really means a lot to me.

The last kiss in one of the bathroom stalls at Fiumicino Airport, ten hours of flight, a cab from the JFK. New York, 114th Street. My apartment. Window facing noisy courtyard; never any sun, hardly any room for anything – I didn’t even know I owned so many books – and bed way too small after the Roman hotel. The same music from the windows, the overfilled answering machine, the invitation from my friends for a supper. The immediate call from my mother: she hoped I would stay home for a couple of weeks before the school year. I shrug my shoulders indifferently. 

If you put a band-aid on your pain… 

I`d like to hop on the same plane and come with the shirt on my back, an extra swimtrunks, a toothbrush! 

I dialed the professor’s number. “Wish we could start all over in that room. Both leaning out the window in the evening, rubbing shoulders, as we did in Rome — every day of my life,” I suddenly heard. 

“Every day. Shirt, toothbrush, score, and I'm flying over, so don't tempt me either. I took something from your room.” 

“What?”

“Find out for yourself.”  
Silence. And then, hurriedly:

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t.”

That’s all we’re left with for at least four months to come. The letters, in which we cannot be too revealing, and conversations like this one.

I’ve already mentioned taking something from his room. An antique framed postcard. It shows Monet on a berm somewhere around 1905. Painted in 1914. The postcard and _Armance_. I could touch both of these things. It seemed they still held Elio’s warmth; they were the only things that proved that I had not seen these six weeks in a fever. 

Several days later I came home to a small town near Boston. For such an occasion, almost all my family showed up for tea: grandfather, two uncles with their wives, sister Rachel with her husband and children, some of the cousins; everyone wanted to hear about my trip. You want it? You’ll get it!

Just don’t tear off the band-aid.

I’ve noticed quite a while ago: when two members of a family or two intimate friends are separated, and one goes abroad and one remains at home, the return of the relative or friend who has been travelling always seems to place the relative or friend who has been staying at home at a painful disadvantage when the two first meet. The sudden encounter of the new thoughts and new habits eagerly gained in the one case, with the old thoughts and old habits passively preserved in the other, seems at first to part the sympathies of the most loving relatives and the fondest friends, and to set a sudden strangeness, unexpected by both and uncontrollable by both, between them on either side. After the first moments of that meeting passed, I felt this alienation immediately and understood that everyone else was feeling it too. I wasn’t surprised by it and did everything to dispel it. 

Sicily - Taormina, Catania, Palermo, Syracuse - Naples, Rome. Capitol and Villa Borghese, the Basilica of San Clemente. I talked and talked. The younger generation was especially interested; the older gave the youth a chance to pile me up with questions, listening attentively to my answers. Why keep a dog and bark yourself? Alienation seemingly disappeared, but I could not get rid of the feeling that I failed to fit in my own house. It was too tight for me, like a suit a couple of sizes smaller, and all my relatives seemed to be outsiders somehow brought to the planet that belonged to me and Elio. As if they were swapped – or I was. 

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered, right? Perhaps, but I would say there is nothing WORSE. I prayed for the weeks remaining to the beginning of the school year to fly by faster. Only work, a lot of work could save me. 

Bit by bit I settled into my old routine, and then the studies began. Elio and I wrote to each other; professor also wrote to me occasionally, and Vimini did it constantly. I thought that I had taken control over my life and my feelings again. I forgot that since the recent time when I told myself something like that I would quickly end up under the wheels of an old train with the emblems of the Royal House of Savoy, rushing along the route “Later – Now. Terminus.” 

One never feels quite so bad that it can’t get worse. For Hanukkah, one circumstance, which I completely overlooked, dare I say, threw me out of the state of blissful anticipation of the future rendezvous. 

I went home for the last two days of the holiday. On December 8, we were having a late dinner in a close circle – my sister, our parents and me; the kids had been sent to sleep by then. I noticed the glances that my mother and father were exchanging, yet I couldn’t understand for whom they were meant. Finally, father took the floor. 

“I’m glad you’re in a good standing at the university,” he began. “You’ve done great work and laid a solid foundation for your future career…” 

I waited, not understanding where it was going. 

“Now you can think about a family matters.”

Wasn’t he hinting that the debts, the funds spent for my education in the University of Columbia, already needed to be returned? Actually, I had nothing against the discussion of this issue.

“I’m ready whenever you are. When do you want me to do it?” 

“I’m thinking the end of spring or the beginning of summer, after the studies end.” 

“But it’s possible I won’t make the required sum… All right, I’ll arrange a loan.” 

“What does the loan have to do with it? We can keep it in the family, if your money won’t be enough.” 

I stopped understanding anything. What did he mean by “family”? 

“Father, what are you talking about? Why should anyone help me return your money?” 

He was clearly surprised.

“I didn’t say anything about money.” 

Now it was me who was surprised. 

“What were you talking about then?”

“I was talking about your family,” he emphasized the word ‘your’ with his voice. “Your future wedding, to be precise.” 

My ears started ringing. Suddenly it seemed that it became dark in the room; I felt nauseated, hot and cold simultaneously, lost my breath. Blood rushed to my head, and I felt like Ananias left into the hot furnace.

“The day before yesterday, Gwendolyn’s parents came to visit us; they agree that it is the best time for engagement…” my mother continued. 

I jumped out of my chair involuntarily, though unsure whether I would be able to stand on my feet, and my plate fell down on the floor. I closed my eyes and grabbed the edge of the table, completely sure that blood would run from my nose, like with Elio, or from my eyes. I inhaled deeply and exhaled, and then turned around silently and left the dining room, somehow managing not to slam the door. I needed to get away from this fatal room. Immediately. 

It might seem incredible that I forgot about my own would-be marriage. The fact of the matter is that my father and I had agreed to it two years ago, as people agree to an advantageous purchase – purchase of a place for a family crypt at the city cemetery. Surely, it would have come back sooner or later, but you have to agree that at the age of twenty-two it is reasonable to think that it would be later rather than sooner.

I’ll say a couple of words about how marriages among us are arranged. The accountable process of creating a family was never let run itself. Is it because of many ages of dissemination of our people, making us hold on to the close ones and disapprove of marriages with representatives of other cultures or religions? Or is such behavior typical of all small social groups, by whatever attribute they distinguish themselves? The constant threat of the national self-identity crisis (and demographic crisis too, by the way) made people take the family values seriously. There were exceptions, but the story of my grandfather, who rejected the carefully selected candidate, stayed in the distant past, and it shall be attributed to his strong personality, decent fortune and personal qualities of his spouse: upbringing, patience, and beauty. 

I probably learned this simple truth with the air I breathed: family is children, they must be, and children are wife. I knew Gwen since I was a kid, and it wasn’t hard for me to guess that from a certain moment, which was roughly around the time I entered the University, my parents started to view her as a potential daughter-in-law. As a matter of fact, I didn’t have any objections back then, and even now any man would be happy to have such wife. A brunette, grey-eyed, medium in height, moderately – as my father accurately remarked – attractive and educated, properly brought-up, she had a clear mind, great common sense and practical savvy, foreshadowing her future ability to build healthy family relationships, nurture children and the careful increase of family’s bank balances. I’ve never been in love with anyone so much as to not understand that Gwen wasn’t worse than any other.

Nor I can say that I loved her, neither that I didn’t. She was of the type that always attracted me, but I knew that I would have her; perhaps it prevented me from going crazy over her. From this point of view, the fact that they choose a spouse from our own circle is another plus, I thought. Moreover, I had witnessed the same method tested on Rachel, who is six years older than me. She was fairly satisfied with her marriage; she and her husband already had three children, two sons and a daughter, and I couldn’t say that her husband looked as if he wanted to escape the house using any opportunity. It served as the best proof that my sister’s satisfaction was substantiated. Love is not the only measure for choosing a partner in life; otherwise, our expenses for wedding gifts would be reduced significantly. 

But the very thing that proved good for my sister was now threatening to drive me crazy. I didn’t just feel like a tribal stallion; my heart was also being ripped to shreds by powerlessness and unbearable anguish. 

I hadn’t lied to myself for a long time, understanding how tightly Elio wrapped himself around the very foundations of my existence, how he sprouted into me. Whatever our souls were made of, they were the same, and at the thought of losing him forever (and it was the only possible way), I clenched my fists to hold back the howl raging out of my chest. How can you live if they take away your soul? This, as I thought, even didn’t have a name yet. 

However, what arguments could I present to explain that I wouldn’t marry the girl, whom I myself agreed to be engaged to two years ago? How could I break my promise? I was afraid to see contempt in my father's eyes; afraid to let my mother and my family down - for I am, to my great misfortune, the only son of the eldest son. These are the shackles covered with diamonds; this is the golden crown of thorns. All the hope and the future of my family rest on my shoulders and a family is above everything! And it can perhaps be above stupid personal likings of one offspring, who is probably unworthy of the honored name. 

Surely, my parents weren’t that heartless. The arrangement is not engagement, and its termination wouldn’t have affected Gwen’s reputation. If I admitted that I had a serious crush on another girl, my parents would have at least asked me about her, tried to meet my beloved one and get to know her better. If Elio was a girl, everything could’ve played out better. He is from a good family and of the right religion, and the age… Well, the age is not a problem; they would’ve just delayed the wedding for two or three years. But a seventeen-year-old boy lover, who, above all things, makes me reject having a family and continue its bloodline? Nobody would understand this; even my grandfather would abandon me. I was already a culprit of an actual scandal, when I refused to engage in the family business, having preferred the path of a humanitarian instead of a financier. Indeed, we did have a somewhat shaky agreement afterwards. But our family won’t stand another scandal, which would be much worse than the first one. Sure, no one will send me to the correctional facility now. I will just become a pariah in my own family. 

And if I married and then tried to see Elio secretly, it wouldn’t have lead to anything good, even if I wasn’t against it. You can get away with such things for a time, if you limit it to single meetings and remain cautious, which I was doing successfully up to that moment. But constant attachment to one man will be revealed inevitably.

I rubbed my temple and reflexively glanced at the clock. It seemed as if a whole day had passed, but it was only fifteen minutes. Someone – father, mother, or Rachel – will certainly come to me, and I had to meet them, armed with a firm decision. 

So what options do I have? I could go to Savadge’s clinic and get a frontal lobotomy. I laughed, but my laughter sounded devilish in the silence of the room. Only operation could help me stop wanting Elio, loving Elio, right? Distance and time failed to help me yet, like logic and self-preservation did before. 

I could abandon wedding, break ties with my family, give up lecturing and return to Italy, to Elio, to what we had there. But he’s so young! Are his feelings strong enough? Will they stand the excessive responsibility if he knows what I gave up for him? I wouldn’t be able to hide it even if I wanted to; if not me, then someone else will enlighten him about it. Won’t he feel… under obligation, OWING to love? Won’t he feel one not-so-wonderful day like trapped in a cage that he can’t break out from? This is what would be truly awful. And such decision would also mean breakup with my mother, with Rachel and my beloved grandfather… 

What’s to decide then? Didn’t I know what I would do the moment I comprehended the news? 

The door creaked. Rachel sat down silently on the bed, took my hands into hers without saying a word and pressed them to her cheek. 

“Honey, we understand. You met someone there, in Italy, didn’t you?” 

I hung my head. There was no denying it. 

“Did something happen between you?”

A silent nod.

“Did everything happen?”

Another nod.

“Were you at least… careful?”

CAREFUL? Of course, who would think of anything else in my sister’s place? Regardless of the hearty anguish, I smiled. That was definitely not a problem with me and Elio! 

“Don’t worry, it’s all fine.” 

She exhaled with relief. 

“And what’s with Gwen now?”

“Nothing. It was… it was just unexpected. I’ll cope. There’s nothing bad about feeling sad for some time.” 

“Of course you will, little brother. I have no doubts.” She ruffled my hair gently with her fingers. But I couldn’t confess anything even to Rachel, who was always closer to me than my mother. “Just don’t try to do it fast. Psyche doesn’t stand the fuss, I’m telling you that as a mother of a family. Even if you regret your choice now…” 

“I don’t.”

“Anyway, you will tell it to… to that girl?” 

And I had to drink to the lees too. The least I could do was to look Elio in the eyes. 

“I promised to Professor Perlman that I will spend Christmas with his family. Then I’ll find… her and explain myself. I don’t think, however, that I’ll have to explain a lot. Italians take it easier.” 

“You know better, Casanova,” Rachel kissed me on the forehead, calmed. "You have half a year ahead of you. In six months you won’t even remember her. It’s like measles."

My sister had it simple. As if it was actually possible to cure love with a soothing mixture of butter and honey, like measles. 

My medicine will be far bitterer. I have to erect the mental walls and equip them with false doors. Hide, suppress and even forget my own emotions. I can’t let myself have uncontrolled contemplations. Never. I have to keep my thoughts at bay at all times and never come back to where we had fun in the sea at night under the newborn moon. Never dive into the memories without necessity, especially into the memories of our last night in Rome. 

And hope fiercely that it will help me FORGET. 

*****

I kept my promise and came back just before Christmas and stayed till New Year's. And even though the winter in Italian Riviera is different from the one in New England, everything changed drastically. The sea now had a winter, ashen shade. The pool was closed to prevent leaves from falling into it, and no one thought of working at the table outside. But life was still bursting forth indoors. It smelled like spices and orange peel; upon my arrival, Mafalda gave me a glass wrapped in a snow-white napkin and filled it with wonderful mulled wine.

“You look tired,” Elio whispered to me at some point. 

“The trip was really exhausting,” I brushed off his words. He looked closely at me, and a dark cloud appeared on his face that had just been shining with the restricted flame of happiness. 

We rode to B. on bikes. The town felt empty, the sky was gray. The ice cream vendor was closed for the season. As were the flower shop and the pharmacy where we'd stopped on leaving the berm that very first time when I scratched my side and needed an antiseptic. They all belonged to my past life now.

I was trying to avoid Elio as much as I could; I had to have gather courage before the inevitable vivisection, and I was wasting hours with his parents mostly, and later – with Vimini, who was incredibly happy to see me. Before our departure to Rome, she was feeling unwell, and we packed things so quickly that I didn’t say goodbye. Now I gladly devoted as much time as I could to her. Soon, probably, I will have my own children, and I will love them, even if I won’t be able to love someone else. 

In the evening Elio went upstairs, throwing one of his puzzled looks at me, which I ignored diligently. Professor and I stayed talking over whiskey and cigarettes until late night. We discussed my book that had already been published in England, France, Germany and, most recently, Italy, about lecturing, Elio’s further studies and his musical talents. And about me, although I understood quickly that it was more about me and him. I wanted to ask how the professor knew. But then I thought: how could he not? How could all the others not know? 

The professor was asking me about work and future plans, about my family; we were talking about things that a father and a son could be discussing, and I realized: if I don’t make it clear right now, it will go too far. 

“I’m glad that Elio has a good friend like you,” professor saluted me with his glass. His eyes were smiling. “You two are happy to have found each other.” 

“Does signora know, too?” 

“I don’t think so,” he answered softly. I heard it in his voice: “But even if she did, I am sure her attitude would be no different than mine.” 

“Thank you,” I took a sip and pulled myself together. “By the way, congratulate me. I’m engaged.” 

The smile disappeared from his face.

“You are? Congratulations.” He emptied his glass with a single gulp. “When’s the wedding?” 

“In May, probably. Or, perhaps, in June.” 

“You are engaged,” the professor said again. “Does Elio know?” 

“No. Not yet.”

“He was waiting… for you. I hope you’ll explain yourself before you leave. If, of course, it can be explained at all.” His voice changed subtly. “If you say that you knew that when you came here in June, you’re not such a good friend as I thought you were.” 

I shook my head.

“I would never insult him or your house in such way. The engagement happened only two weeks ago.” 

“I’m glad to hear that.”

Alertness and a barely perceptible threat. My mouth filled with bitterness, as if he gave me cinchona instead of whiskey. 

“Forgive me.” I was turning the glass in my hands and looking at the floor. I couldn’t raise my eyes and look at Elio’s father. “I’ll leave immediately if you wish.” 

“You don’t ask forgiveness for love,” he said suddenly, striking me to the core. “No one can boast discovering its mystery. No one knows in advance to whom and when it will come knocking…” 

He grinned at the sight of my wide-open eyes, and suddenly leaned towards me very closely.

“Why are you getting married?” he asked quietly. “You don’t seem to be in love, and I can see love. Do you know how you look? You look like a criminal trembling under the executioner’s axe!” 

I swallowed.

“I won’t say that this engagement has ever had a strong hold on my affections. Nothing has changed about them since the summer.”

“Then I pity you more than I pity Elio, and there are hard times ahead of him.” 

“He’s young, and his mind is flexible. He will forget me,” I disagreed. “Moreover, he has you.” 

“Sure.” Professor lit a cigarette and pushed the box to me. “I would be a bad father if I started lecturing him now. But you are mistaken. No people who shared what you shared will ever forget it.” 

We smoked silently for some time.

“I’ll go and speak with Elio,” I said at last. It was late in the night already. 

“Go.” The professor waved his hand, and a column of ash fell on his knees. “I’m so clumsy…” 

I put out the cigarette in the ashtray, stood up and went to the door. 

“Wait, Oliver.” I turned around. His dark eyes looked at me sympathetically, but the eyebrows frowned and I trembled. “It’s up to you how you are going to live your life. I got accustomed to respecting other people’s wishes and feelings even more than my own.” He was talking slowly, weighing every word. “I also respect the decision you’ve made, whatever reason made you come to it. But remember one thing. When you will lead a double life, and you will, considering the circumstances, don’t dare drag Elio into it. If I know about it, I will throw away all my principles of non-intervention and destroy you!” 

“You don’t need to threaten me; I wasn’t going to do that anyway. You have my word.” I gave him my hand, and he shook it. 

At that moment, signora Annella entered the study very conveniently and removed the tension. 

“What can you talk about for so long?” she asked, jokingly pretending to be outraged. “It’s high time you went to bed!” 

We said goodnight to each other, and she kissed me on the cheek gently. 

Only the most difficult thing remained: ascend the stairs – I couldn’t make myself pass through our balcony – and say the truth. Or whatever I was going to give out as truth.

Elio was lying in his bed, reading. I sat on the very edge of his bed. I wanted to embrace him; I’d been dreaming for four months about touching the naked skin of his hand, his shoulder, sliding along his back, enjoying its flexibility and suppleness… but I didn’t have the right. Not anymore.

“Do you want to tell me something?” 

How could I think that he wouldn’t smell a rat, knowing me? Our interaction, restrained reluctantly in letters, was much gentler in telephone conversations; for this reason, I had been avoiding them for the last two weeks. I was used to acting, but I felt that such level of acting skills was beyond me. 

“Yes. I might be getting married this spring.”

Bright eyes stared at me with an unclear expression. 

"But you never said anything." 

"Well, it's been on and off for more than two years." 

"I think it's wonderful news." His smile was almost sincere, but I didn’t let myself be deceived. I saw how quickly it slid down his face. 

“Did you mind?” 

“You're being silly,” he snapped. 

There was a long pause. I thought suddenly: “Silly? What would I do if he answered ‘I did!’?” My skin got instantly covered with goosebumps. 

"Will you be getting in bed now?" 

"For a short while."

I lay down on top of the blanket, taking off only my loafers. 

“But you don’t think that I’ll stay for long here, do you?” I asked wryly. 

“This is going to be the last time.”

I kissed Elio, not like I did before, during the ten days of July and then in Rome. But the taste of his lips, his smell… I was afraid that I would give up in a second. Regardless of what I promised to Elio’s father, I didn’t want to stoop so low. I moved back. 

“I can’t do…”

“I can!” he leaned towards me.

“Yes, but I can’t.”

The look that Elio gave me was deadlier than a bullet and more eloquent than any words. I lost my breath for a second, as if he pierced my chest with a spear and turned it inside. 

“Believe me, I'd love nothing better than to take your clothes off and at the very least hold you. But I can’t.” 

He put his arms around my head and held it. 

"Then maybe you shouldn't stay. They know about us."

"I figured". 

"How?" 

"By the way your father spoke. You're lucky. My father would have carted me off to a correctional facility." 

Elio moved towards me again, and we kissed. I tried to make it the goodbye kiss – the Judas kiss – gentle and warm. 

Since the next morning, our relationship became chilly-and-workshopped. 

Members of my family celebrate Christmas, even though not with such panache as in Christian families. This was the influence of my grandmother, who refused to abandon her religion. Certain small details are missing of course: no one goes to church; there are no Christmas hymns or angel figures. However, according to my own observations, Christians rarely perceive this holiday as religious regardless of their confessions, and Santa Claus is hardly connected to the Birth of Jesus Christ. Perhaps that is why Santa Claus used to come to me and Rachel and our cousins. I think it was done in part for us, children, to mitigate the inevitable isolation in school. And yet that holiday feeling which is typical of Christmas, the beginning of something new, hope for a miracle that is only possible at the end of December comes in childhood and remains in adult life whether you want it or not. Only after losing these feelings you understand what you’ve lost.

Nineteen dates of the same kind passed since that Christmas. I can’t call it any other way, because there has been no more magic in it for me; there has been no expectation of a miracle, of a holiday. During these periods, I’ve been living, acting and smiling like a programmed robot, and the only emotion that brought something good to Christmas was the joy at the sight of delight of my children. I haven’t been expecting anything myself, and I still don’t. 

Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies, if not more.  
*****

I got married in June of 1984, just as planned. The professor and signora sent gifts and Elio included a two-line note with congratulations. I didn’t pay attention to it; I understood it was a formality. It is just a tradition to congratulate newlyweds. A happy event, after all. Marriage means love, love means marriage, and if there’s no love and it has never been, let’s turn a blind eye and remember Pierpont Morgan. 

The only letter I received from Elio after my wedding (and even that was delayed) simply informed about Vimini’s death. It happened a year later; my elder son, Joshua, was only three months old, but the Wife persuaded me to take her on a trip to Israel. 

Who knows what Rachel or my mother told her about the circumstances of our marriage. I guess they shared everything they suspected, and surely with the best intentions: to warn her for future. I came up to such conclusion because my Wife started to insist on spending our honeymoon in Italy and visit Professor Perlman. Whether Gwen wanted to mark her territory in a purely feminine way, announce it loud and clear that I belonged to her, and the others shall accept with it, or tried to find her rival and take a look at her, I don’t know. And I've never asked. But I would rather stab my eyes out than bring her to the villa; that’s why I offered her a trip to _the Most Romantic City in the world_ , Paris. Find me a woman that will be against such an offer. I’ve learned this weapon, the arguments that one cannot object, perfectly. 

The described situation repeated itself many times. Whenever we were deciding where to go, Italy and professor always emerged. However, I was firm. I decided to let sleeping dogs lie, and I actually did. I closed and locked all memories and tried not to come back to them. I didn’t ask or try to recognize anything, and threw away any trace of Elio from my thoughts. I knew from the professor’s letter what college Elio was attending in the States, and the decision seemed right to me. But that was it. Our communication stopped. 

The blank years were passing by. The pain subsided; the shame of the committed betrayal became less acute. I taught a lot, published articles and wrote two more monographs. I’ve earned myself a name and was doing my preferred thing. We moved to Boston; I had a settled house and enough money for everything, including travelling. Another son was born, Harald; we call him Harry. It was my grandfather who asked to call him a Norwegian name; like me, Harry inherited my granny’s looks, and grandfather was extremely proud of it. 

Watching my sons grow appeared to be extremely exciting. Being as confident as a man can be that Josh and Harry were my own children, I often tried to figure out whom they were taking after. They didn't seem to have anything in common with their looks, characters or interests. 

Josh is a brunet of medium height and has his mother’s eyes, grey and clever. He is a bit slow, but he compensates it with his thoughtfulness and the insight unprecedented for his age. My elder son has been so independent and secretive since childhood that it bordered on filial disobedience. His defiant “I won’t tell” or the later, exquisitely polite “Sorry, dad, I can’t tell you that” – that’s all I heard from him when I tried to find out who pushed Harry to participate in another boyish mischievous trick, or where he himself managed to get hammered at the age of only sixteen and something. And even after being punished for this “I won’t tell”, Josh still refused to answer. On the other hand, I never heard him lie to me or say _Yes_ while thinking _No_. 

Harry is a compressed spring of vehemence and hidden energy, a high blue-eyed blonde of that type that they call _his face says it all_. The openness, which is an artificial quality of mine, is inherited in him. If he gets interested in something, he can flare up like powder and carry out in a day the amount of work that would have taken him a month if he was under pressure. And though he had his own secrets of course, he’s not curious and prefers to be engaged in his own business rather than someone else’s. Also, Harry is the first man in our family who is fully deprived of panic at the sight of blood. 

At first, I used to think that Josh would make a pure humanist judging by his addiction to reading, history, and drawing, and that Harry would become either an actor or a doctor; he has always been interested in biology. How surprised I was when Harry’s obsession with space (he has read and watched all the sci-fi he has managed to get to) didn’t pass with age! My younger son is seriously aimed at a career in NASA; he just hasn’t decided yet whether he wants to be an aircraft engineer or to pilot the same aircrafts. It seems there can be a military man in our family after all. As for Josh, who is quite good with pencil and paints, chose the poetry embodied in stone - architecture, which itself implies engineering degree. They both don’t want to dedicate themselves to finance, thus disappointing my father. He thought that the kids would replace him one day, since there was no counting on me. Alas. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms. 

But even before, realizing that there was no way to drag me into the family business, my father, to my surprise and significant joy, left those attempts and switched his attention to Gwen. Not having a university degree, she was, as I’ve mentioned before, distinguished by her financial abilities and business acumen. Moreover, she knows how to hide an iron fist in a velvet glove, and my father slowly began instructing her to negotiate with clients and carry out similar tasks.

*****

Nine years after Elio’s last letter we were spending our holidays in Europe, planning to come to Rome from Switzerland. Then Gwen finally had to let me out of her tight grip and stay in Geneva for a while on account of some assignment from my father. I said that I would meet her in Rome, and before I would entertain the children. Do I have to say WHERE I was going to entertain them? 

This act looked much like insanity. Ten years have passed, but I still couldn’t forget just like Elio's father predicted. Can you live without a half of your soul? Yes, you can – like a disabled person lives without his legs, or like a man who has suddenly gone blind. There are certain pleasures in their lives, there’s no denying it, but they will always remember what it was like to stand on feet or watch the sunset. Professor was also right about my future double life. I had my short flings and romantic affairs. Some of them were attempts to find the romance that was missing from my marriage, and it helped for a while, others – instant desperate impulses. It even seemed to me sometimes that I found the thing I’d lost, but the disappointment always came too soon. In no person I was able to find what I was looking for; as if I burnt out in 1983, having put all my spiritual powers in that love. 

Of course, I adore my sons, but that is not merit of mine. Loving our children and caring about them is instinctive and unconditional; it is the heritage of our biological nature. It might sound ambiguous, but my love for Elio was something like fatherly or brotherly: in the end, I started to perceive him as a part of me, the better part, how I perceive Josh and Harry now. I never had a feeling like this towards any woman, even towards Gwen. How could I love something that wasn’t in her? 

However, I considered myself quite protected from spontaneous actions. I could stay at professor’s villa only for a day, and my children were with me. But I didn’t expect to fail to see Elio! My mind was used so much to his image in that house, on that balcony, at that piano that it refused to make peace with the sad reality. I felt deceived and disappointed; I was hoping that drips of the old happiness would rain on me like dew from the sky. 

I don’t know whether signora Annella noticed this disappointment: she was playing with the kids on the carpet, but professor found the length of my foot in the wink of an eye.

“It is night time on the East Coast now,” he said, looking at the watch. “But, considering the exceptionality, I think he’ll forgive us…” 

And he dialed the number. No one picked up for a long time. 

“Sorry for getting you out of bed, but you'll never guess who is staying with us!” he said at last. “In your old bedroom. And standing right in front of me now."

Pause.

“The fact that you refuse to say you've already guessed says a great deal,” the professor said with a snicker before saying goodbye and passed me the phone. I took it with my stiff fingers. I called him by the name, by his name. How long it has been since it was on my lips… 

“Elio.”

And he exhaled in response:

“Elio…”

No one called me by their name as if it was mine. No one whispered it into my ear when at the peak of passion. No one, no one, no one… Josh, who was eight years old, screeched enthusiastically, which had the effect of an ice bucket. 

“It's Oliver,” I responded calmly. “They showed me pictures, you haven't changed.” 

“Did you come alone?” Elio asked after a pause. His voice sounded much colder. 

“No, my boys are with me, you know, I have two sons, they are playing in the living room,” I said quickly. “They are eight and six, and I would be happy to introduce you to them… and to their mother,” I added in an afterthought. “I’m so happy to be here again, you just can’t imagine…”

“That is the most beautiful place I know.” 

And I was carried away further:

“You don’t know how happy I am…” 

“To hear your voice is like to return to paradise, which I yearned for, like exiled Adam, for many years. As if that night, on the berm, you tied us to this earth forever, and time stopped,” I could have said. “Here I will always be twenty-four, and you’re seventeen when we were fed each other ice cream at the square, mixed Leopardi into Khayyam, and talked about Heraclitus. And we were drinking our happiness avidly, in rain and thunder, not afraid to go to the same hell.” 

Such moments pass quickly. The words of goodbye, and I passed the phone to signora. The next day we left for Rome. That city, regardless of also being full of memories, wasn’t threatening me with a loss of self-control so strongly. It’s huge, and the touristic routes avoid dark alleys of the old Rome, where we walked together at night and kissed each other again and again. 

Josh and Harry were interrupting each other every second, sharing impressions and jumping up on the chairs of a summer café, like two sparrows, and I caught the Wife’s look saying “I know you’ve been quick to take the chance”, but I wasn’t worried about it at all. Even if she decides to call the professor under some pretext, she won’t know anything, however artfully she sets the traps. There was nothing to find out; there was no one to catch.

*****

In about four years, Elio suddenly appeared in Harvard, where I was teaching at the time. I’ll tell about that encounter because I started writing this long letter in my mind right after it. 

I was delayed by one of the students; he had questions regarding the lecture. I was packing my books and packing loose sheets into a folder, simultaneously giving him explanations. With a corner of my eye, I saw someone behind his back and mistook this other man for a student, not paying much attention to him. 

“You probably don’t remember me.”

These words took me by surprise. I looked up. There was a young man in front of me, who was dressed quite extraordinarily. A leather bomber jacket, a white T-shirt, jeans tucked into high boots, long dark hair and a stylish beard – some easy rider or a rock band singer. “He would have looked much more fitting on a bike than here, at an ancient culture lecture,” I thought; however, our students have the right to wear whatever they want. Regardless of this tags, the man looked strangely familiar. And the characteristic line of his eyebrows… Did one of my random lovers find me? I was very careful, remembering the possibility of blackmailing, but even a good marksman may miss. I already opened my mouth, preparing to decline the claims politely, but suddenly our eyes met – light hazelnut, with a greenish spark… I staggered back, stunned. 

“Good God... Elio!” 

We hugged each other; I couldn’t believe my eyes, couldn’t correlate the Elio I remembered with the one I was holding in my arms. The body, familiar to the smallest detail, became different: clumsiness and boyish angularity disappeared, his shoulders became wider, and thinness was replaced with grace. The teenager vanished, leaving in his place a fairly attractive man. Or rather a damn attractive man. He grew by two and a half inches, and I wouldn’t have had to bend too much to kiss him, and it would have been so easy to put my head on his shoulder, rub the rough fabric of his shirt with the back of my head… I involuntarily followed the beautiful bend of his back with my palm and remembered the slightly protruding vertebrae, looked at his lips… Only his eyes remained the same, as well as their expression: he was looking at me as if I was a God. None of his photos, even of Elio’s image on stage (there, he wore a formal suit, and his hair was combed into a low ponytail) prepared me for it. 

“Dear God! Don’t let me go crazy!”

It had been fifteen years – and one look was all it took to reawake the feelings that I seemingly buried deep and properly twelve feet under and thus escaped understanding that Elio had been the hole in my head for all these cursed years, the silence in between what I thought and I spoke; the space in my bed. 

I patted his cheek, as I would’ve done with Josh. 

“Just look at you!” I laughed, gently pushing him aside and holding his shoulders. “Look, come for a drink, come for dinner, tonight, now, meet my wife, my boys. Please, please, please!” 

“I'd love to…”

“I only have to drop in my office, and off we go.” 

“You don’t understand. I'd love to. But I can’t.” 

His “I can’t” didn’t mean “I wasn't free”; it meant “I can, but I won’t.” These were the words I said, lying in our bed for the last time. I failed to understand at first whether it pleased or upset me. So I asked him. 

“You never did forgive me, did you?”

“Forgive? There was nothing to forgive. If anything, I'm grateful for everything. I remember good things only.” 

It was enough to look at his face to see that Elio grew up truly; over all those years, he mastered the art to hide true motives behind a beautiful facade. Perhaps, he didn't actually hold a grudge against me – after all, no grief lasts forever, - but he didn’t forget anything. And he surely didn’t forget that I failed to call him by my name in response. 

We were leaving my classroom and stepped into the commons where one of those long, languorous autumnal sunsets on the East Coast threw luminous shades of orange over the adjoining hills; it seemed as if it was late fall. 

After visiting B. four years ago I started to inquire into Elio’s life. He graduated from the Blair School of Music of the Vanderbilt University, as the professor Perlman told me then, carefully trying to hide his pride; he wrote and arranged music and performed as a soloist with symphonic orchestra. Elio wrote music for several films and TV-shows, mostly Italian, but there were also American ones; his arrangements were used in documentaries. He lived in Plymouth, only 100 kilometers away from Boston, where I lived now. I avoided the temptation to look at his house, but visited one of his concerts, trying to sit as far as possible and remain unnoticed. By the way, he continued his memorable experiments, combining compositions of two or three authors or changing them into something modern. The combination of Gluck’s Dance of the Furies and Vivaldi’s Seasons, frankly speaking, almost made my heart jump out of my chest. 

Elio wasn’t targeted by paparazzi too often; however, after surfing the Web for some time, I found several photos of him with his friends and women, different one each time. Apparently, he had no family of his own. From the Web I also found out about his father’s death and his mother’s starting malady. Both things upset me extremely. 

“Let’s go, I’ll show you something,” I said, finishing my business and walking towards my study. 

My penchant for creative mess will hardly ever leave me. Papers were strewn about the sofa and on the floor, except for the corner seat, which was under an alabaster lamp. Elio smiled, looking at this mess; he clearly remembered the sheets lining chaotically everywhere I had the honor and pleasure to work. 

“I wanted to show you this.”

Next to the colored reproduction of the San Clemente fresco, on the wall was a framed postcard with a picture of the Monet’s berm. I kept it in my study, just like I kept _Armance_ with the dedicatory inscription among the books. Even during the darkest hours I didn’t dare to throw this memento away; I just put it aside. 

Elio came closer and touched the frame with his fingertips.

“It used to be mine, but you've owned it far, far longer than I have.” 

There were times when fire and brimstone from the sky couldn’t make us part, but my decision and the years that passed gave us to other men of property. Did they possess us by right? Or did they feel like usurpers, as if someone would ask them to pull up roots any second? 

“I had hoped one day to let one of my sons bring it in person when he comes for his residency,” I said silently. “Then you’ll read two words on the back, which I added.” 

“My posthumous confession”.

Elio didn’t say anything; he just stared at me. I evaded his look and changed the subject. 

“Are you staying in town?” I asked, putting on my raincoat. 

“Yes. For one night.”

“Alone?” I blurted out. 

He nodded, not surprised by my question. 

“I'm seeing some people at the university tomorrow morning, then I'm off. Let's have a supper at my hotel.” 

I blushed instantly. Those who have supper together, often have breakfast together the following morning. Am I ready for such a twist? Elio caught my anxious look. 

“I said supper, not a fuck.” 

Am I so easy to read? Apparently, I am, since Elio suddenly touched my hand. 

“What are these?” he pointed at a sunspot. I shuddered from the tenderness of this touch. 

“Sunspots. I have them all over.”

He looked me over, quickly but as if absorbing me from my head to my toes. Then he leaned, trying to get a closer look. Suddenly it seemed to me that he was going to touch my hand with his lips. I pulled it back. 

“That’s when my habit of sunbathing with my pale skin reminds of itself,” I grinned. “Moreover, I’m getting old. In three years my elder son will be as old as you were back then…” 

In the bar of the old New England hotel, we found a quiet spot overlooking the river and a large flower garden that was very much in bloom that month. 

We were sitting side by side and having the weirdest conversation in the world interspersing the unrivaled sincerity with simple friendly questions. We talked about work, my children and two once young people who found so much happiness during six weeks and living out their time like Raphael de Valentine, trying to stretch this _la peau de chagrin_. 

“In another eight years, I'll be forty-seven and you forty. Five years from then, I'll be fifty-two and you forty-five. Will you come for dinner then?” 

“Yes.” 

“So what you're really saying is you'll come only when you think you'll be too old to care. When we will be left with only canasta, strong eau-de-vie, and perhaps talking about my grandchildren.” 

We fell silent. The unfulfilled echoed in numerous thin glasses above the bar, throbbed like a firefly in the mind. Was it whiskey untying my tongue, or was I just tired, deadly tired from silence and loneliness? 

“God, the way they envied us from across the dinner table that first night in Rome,” I said. “Do you remember? Staring at us, the young, the old, men, women — every single one of them at that dinner table — gaping at us, because we were so happy.” 

“Perhaps I am not yet ready to speak of then-us as strangers,” Elio admitted. 

“If it makes you feel any better, I don’t think I ever will be.” 

Silence again. We ordered another round.

“What’s your brightest memory?” I finally interrupted. 

Elio thought awhile.

“Agony on the balcony. Or do you mean the best? Then the first night is the one I remember best — perhaps because I fumbled so much. But also Rome. There is a spot on via Santa Maria dell'Anima, where you pressed me into the wall and kissed without stopping. People kept walking by but I didn't care, nor did you. I revisit Rome and always come there, touch that part of the wall… The stones have a long memory, and so do I. What’s yours?” 

I inhaled deeply; I was glad that he couldn’t see my eyes at that moment. 

“Rome too. Singing together till dawn on Piazza Navona.”

A pause. I looked at him and barely kept from laughing. Elio’s facial expression was priceless – he remembered nothing of it. 

“You were drunk,” I explained.

That night we met a group of some young Dutchmen or Germans, probably. They had guitars, and they were singing The Beatles. Elio took the guitar from one of them and started playing it and singing. Oh, what was going on there! They listened to him as if he were Orpheus, who descended to the kingdom of Hades; one of Dutch girls agreed to follow him anywhere, even to the hotel right then, and I fully understood her. We ended up on the veranda of a café that was closed by that time – me, him and that girl, - and watched the sunrise. 

I told Elio all of this and added: 

“Whatever I say I glad you came.” 

“So am I.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“If you knew in advance… would you start again if you could?” 

Elio leaned on the back of the couch and looked at me, squinting, thinking something over. He had taken off his bomber and the white T-shirt was tight on his torso, emphasizing the relief of his muscles. He was no Schwarzenegger by any measure; he had another kind of beauty – the beauty combining the maturity of his body, the restlessness of his soul and the heart that knew suffer. And this specimen of true masculine perfection was devouring me with his eyes. I caught myself blushing again. It seems we’ve swapped roles. 

“Why are you asking?”

“Because. Just answer.”

“Would I start again if I could? In-a-se-cond,” he finished his whiskey in a single gulp and gave a sign to the bartender. “Another!” 

“I look at you,” I started, “and I feel like we are divided not just in space. You know time goes by so strangely… It's as if I lost twenty years of my life somewhere. So much have changed around me and so little I have changed. Now I feel like I’m twenty-four, only you are older than me now.” 

“How would you call the absent part of life then?” 

“Parallel reality? Time loop?” I’ve snatched a load of those concepts from Harry and his sci-fi. “Coma? Choose whatever you like.” 

Elio twisted his glass.

“You know, I realized why I came,” he said somehow casually. “You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die, because only then will this thing I call my life make any sense. And if I should hear that you died, my life as I know it, the me who is speaking with you now, will cease to exist.” He thought for a moment and smiled. “Sounds like something from classical English literature, don’t you think?” 

I nodded - I thought sisters of Bronte again.

“Sometimes I have this awful picture of waking up in our house in B. and, looking out to the sea, hearing the news from the waves themselves, _He died last night_ , and I get frightened,” Elio continued thoughtfully. "We missed out on so much. I think I’ll choose coma. Tomorrow I go back to my coma, and you to yours. Pardon, I didn’t mean to offend… I’m sure yours is no coma.” 

“No, it’s a parallel life.” 

And parallel reality. I was just briefly visiting this reality, having passed through some wormhole or inventing a time machine. Harry’s favorite characters traveled like that.

“What I don't want is to receive a letter from your son with the bad news: And by the way, enclosed please find a framed postcard my father asked me to return to you. Promise me,” Elio stuttered for a second, and then spoke more persistently: “Promise me it won’t happen!” 

“Promise.”

“What did you write on the back of the postcard?”

“It was going to be a surprise.”

“I'm too old for surprises. They border on pain. I don't want to be hurt — not by you. Tell me.” 

“Just two words.”

“Let me guess: later never comes?”

“Two words, I said. Moreover, writing what you say would be cruel.”

He thought for a while.

“I give up.”

“ _Сor cordium_ , heart of hearts. No other truth is left in my life.”

His fingers clenched the edge of the table; he was staring at me with a heavy look, and I saw the vein on his throat beating. 

Perhaps on that moment “the waters came into our souls; We sank in deep mire: We felt no standing; We came into deep waters; the floods overflowed us.” 

Outside, the night was settling fast: very autumnal, very beginning of school year, very Indian summer, when the sun is so deceivingly like the summer one, and when you realize after sunset that it was an illusion. I didn’t want to go home and bring my thoughts of myself and Elio there, and walked into the first random park. I loved the silence and calamity that reigned there; I was impressed by the pink reflections of the sun on the mountain tops, dark strip of the river and the motley scatter of lights on the opposite bank. 

I sat down on the bench and hid my face in my hands, not caring that an acquaintance could see me. I finally could let my feelings out. 

Elio refused to come to my house, and I understood why as soon as I was in his shoes. My deceit wounded him too deeply; the wound stopped hurting, but the scar remained; it ached and left him restless. Elio didn’t want to meet my children and the woman that became my partner of life and their mother; with the happiness that it meant, as he thought, and that he could never have. If I were him, I would be terrified of this happiness and hurt by any hits of it: schoolbooks scattered around, the welcoming kiss, a cat or a dog running out to meet its master. Mutual love still can turn into a calm friendship, if it is allowed to live for a certain time by its rules, but no forced break has led to sincere friendship yet. I felt it intuitively fifteen years ago; know I knew it from experience. Envy? Yes. Disaffection? Probably – I wouldn’t be able to contemplate calmly the life destined for me and taken from me. Egoistical? Sure!

But am I not the egoistical, or even worse? By my invitation I tried to keep a foot in both worlds, turn Elio into a part of my family, holding him back at the same time. This was not just egoism – this was a pure manipulation, fairly speaking. If Elio was married, had children, then yes, sure, why wouldn’t our families be friends? It would mean that he forgot it enough to start his life from scratch. I didn’t doubt for a second that the professor and signora wouldn’t have put his head under the guillotine, like my parents did; no, they would themselves keep their son from getting trapped into a marriage where there is no (surprise!) main thing. But even in that case, one half of me would’ve been glad; it reduced my own guilt, but the second… Wasn’t I happy deep down that Elio didn’t connect his fate to a woman? Wasn’t I trying to suppress this happiness in vain? Wasn’t I driving away the thought that he was still mine?

I tried to forget; he tried to forget. We would be happier if we could actually forget, but we will never be able to make a clean copy of our lives or erase the memories telling us: “You could have had this instead!” But going back is false, a dead end. Moving ahead was false; looking the other way was false too. And is it worth remembering that the arguments I presented myself long ago were perfectly reasonable if they appeared to be senseless to the same extent?! 

How would it have turned if we ordered another round? Would have our brains shut down enough for us to get up to Elio’s room? Who knows? Now we both weren’t teenagers, not just me, and we were responsible for our acts. Did I want it? Yes. Did he want it? No doubt. Would it be justified? No. It was a spicy, stupefying magic of the kind that I stopped believing in long ago. 

Face it, Oliver, meet it head-on, and read your sentence out loud: you didn’t betray Elio, you betrayed yourself, your heart and soul; betrayed like Esau, who sold his birthright for a plate of lentils. This is because you need only Elio, like you needed him before, and you ought never to have settled for less. 

“You are the only person I'd like to say goodbye to when I die.” He’s thirty-two, I’m thirty-nine; we’re both in our prime, and we both think about death. I only have to imagine this dream - I’m at home, and someone whispers to me: “He’s dead, Elio’s dead!” and something burns my eyes and painfully squeezes my throat. And I’ll have to stare at that goddamn postcard for the rest of my days, and there will be no one to send this postcard to. What's the point if I turn out to be stronger? Worse for me… 

*****

Since that encounter, something finally inside me broke. I stopped sending my thoughts of Elio away and carefully picked through my memories of the inescapable happiness; about the night under the sky full of stars, when he found me sitting on the stone, and the night when I consciously let him be my top and understood that not only love did not have sexes, it also didn't have tops and bottoms; about the ritual on the berm; about him licking honey from my collarbone; and about the last night in Rome, even though we didn’t think back then that it would actually be the last night. I hoped that he was not as lonesome and miserable as me! I hoped that he didn’t think about me all the time like I did. 

I used a separate bedroom from time to time under the pretext that I burned out the midnight lamp and had to get up early in the morning for a jog. Now I moved into it permanently, fearing that I would spill the beans. I didn’t know whether I really talked in my sleep, but I once woke up with Elio’s name on my lips at the light of the bedside lamp switched on by my Wife. That was enough. 

Years passed; our age was already in its third millennium. I still worked a lot. The death of my grandfather in 2002 appeared to be a shock for me: I realized how little I actually knew about someone I loved. Several months before his days he wrote a new will. Distributing shares, investments and other funds between his children, he left his only large property, his house in Boston, to me. But this was not the only reason why I felt that my grandfather realized (if he hadn’t known it before) what was actually happening to my marriage. He always said that he would take my grandmother’s medallion with lapis lazuli to the grave, and I was very surprised when during the announcement of his will I was handed two of his things: the family album with photos and this very medallion in a black velvet box. There was a note in it, explaining, by the way, the secret of my moniker. “No one shall put me in a cage”, inscribed in runes, that’s what the inlay on the lid said. One of the Viking mottos; the spiritual heritage of my grandfather. 

*****

Earlier this year, while consulting about taking certain medication, I heard the unpleasant news that I could no longer wave away. 

“Have you had stressful situations recently? Do you have chronic insomnia?” asked the doctor (not Doctor Savadge, of course, who has been our family doctor for many years). A very good doctor, certainly; the Wife wouldn’t tolerate another one. 

Well, my life since sixteen has been quite fitting the concept of a “stressful situation”, but this question somehow has never arisen before. 

“Nothing special,” I answered, being entirely honest. "The work is as usual. Josh and Harry don’t let me sleep serenely, of course, but they don’t cause serious troubles either. Why?” 

The doctor pointed at the cardiogram, which he had been studying previously. 

“Then I don’t understand much. Wait a minute.” He pressed the intercom button. “Alice, bring me the latest cardiogram for card number 1824, now.” “These peaks are not normal,” he said, returning to me. “I don’t think that you suffered a heart attack on your feet and I missed it the last time, but I have to check everything.” 

The door opened, and the nurse unfolded a tape in front of the doctor. He looked at it only once. 

“I thought so. Here, take a look,” he unfolded the tapes towards me. “This was two years ago, the parameters are normal; this is now. Do you see?” 

I did see.

“Let’s sort it out. Have you had pains in the chest area? Vertigo? Sudden nausea? Fainting? Dyspnea?”

I shook my head in response to all questions.

“Can you explain what’s wrong there?” I asked finally. 

“I’ll try,” the doctor signed; he took a pencil and outlined thin lines drawn by recorders. “Look, the Q waves without pathologies both two years ago and now; therefore, we can exclude the suffered myocardial infarction. On the other hand, the inverted T wave is not normal. And QT interval is also extended. And here we have the inverted U wave, which may indicate pathological changes in the myocardium. Such wave is typical of professional athletes, but you aren’t one of them, right?”

“No, I only swim and jog in the mornings. In general, what would you say?”

“I would say that I see the heart of a man twice older than you. When did you manage to wear it off so much?” 

“During my parallel life,” I could’ve said, but didn’t. I had to deal with this problem without the help of a family doctor. 

“Make another cardiogram for certainty.” He pulled a stack of prescription forms to himself. “And I’ll prescribe two supporting drugs to you. Nevertheless, my dear, the main recommendation is to reduce the level of stress. There are no contraindications concerning sex,” he looked up, distracting himself from his scribbling. “This is to answer the main question all men ask me, and I tell everyone that love never killed anyone, and it won’t unless you abuse your nature. I mean group sex, drugs and other stimulant medicine, lashes with handcuffs and stuff like that.” 

“Thank you for the offer, but I’m not into it,” I answered politely. 

“You all say that,” the doctor snorted. “Anyway. Don’t burn the candle at both ends, love your wife, don’t forget to have a rest and take your pills on time. We will get your heart back to normal; you’re only forty-three, not eighty-three. By the way, speaking of rest, I’m not saying you must lie on the couch. I mean doing whatever makes you happy. If you enjoy cleaning the pathway to your house, take a shovel from the servants and do it!” 

“Where can I find a shovel to clean my life from the garbage and not hurt others more than it’s needed in the process,” I thought. 

I remembered the main character of the movie “Nostalgia”, which we saw once together with Elio. Without fire sacrifice of his friend, he would’ve hardly been able to pass through the pool with a burning candle. If not for the cardiogram, I would’ve probably still lived miserably in Boston. 

Now it’s time for an uneasy confession. 

I’m a COWARD. Not the one who is afraid of heights, spiders or walking through dark streets; I’m a plain coward when it comes to making decisions.

I don’t even want to call this quality faintheartedness or prudence. This would once again mean covering the ugly truth with a pompous explanation. “I’ll think about it later” might be discretion; prudence and caution often bring wonderful fruits, but they easily turn into faintheartedness. And the line between faintheartedness and cowardice is so easy to cross! I flattered myself with the thought that I didn’t do anything indecent to anyone, but I ignored the fact that cowardice was just as fatal. I unconsciously punished Gwen with indifference for the years spent in vain for a coward who failed to let go of someone else (not to mention that this someone was a man) and didn’t find the courage to tell her everything. I would’ve continued bearing the cross of a failed marriage, putting on martyr`s crown in the name of the family, thus finally ruining the life for myself and my Wife, and perhaps our sons. 

Gwen, of course, worked out many things. About my romance with Elio (even though she thought it was a girl), about my subsequent affairs; but she only allowed herself to be subtly ironic about that. Her upbringing prevented her from starting scandals; her absence of fiery feelings, which we both were aware of, kept her from showing jealousy. In fact, over nineteen years – and we hadn’t managed to become loved ones, and that’s the worst. How could it be, let me ask, if there was no sincerity between us from the beginning: neither marital nor even friendly?! 

However from the outside our family seemed to be perfect. We never argued, rarely contradicted each other (that’s because we outlined our spheres of responsibility clearly, and our interests didn’t overlap) and went around the world together; pictures of our house can easily be printed in Ladies' Home Journal; we celebrated Christmas or Sukkoth in chime; our children are obedient and polite – they appear so; the little devils they are. But I'll tell you: if you see such a perfect picture, ask just in case what’s underneath it before putting it on the pedestal of the exemplary relationship. That’s because only models on retouched advertisement photos look exemplary, and perfect relationsip can actually appear to be not an expected family idyll (perhaps they are sometimes), but a real swamp. When the fact whether your half is by your side or not makes you feel neither hot nor cold, but just convenient. 

This is not to say I hate Gwen. In fact, the only claim I could’ve made against her is that I don’t love her, and have never loved her the way that a woman you marry must be loved. And if I failed to understand it, like her, my father or his generation failed to understand, the generation of my children understands it very well. Rachel told me with a mix of horror and delight, that Kylie, my niece, announced loud and clear: if someone tries to find her a husband, if they even mention it, she will immediately enlist as a volunteer to a research station in Antarctica or flee to New Zealand. Rachel is only OK with New Zealand; it’s warmer there. 

I don’t think that the idea of changing one’s life drastically at 44 years will seem exactly tempting to anyone. For several months I’ve been trying to pull myself together, and then merge both of my parallel realities. Since autumn I’m starting to teach at the University of Heidelberg; they’ve been inviting me there for several years. Josh is graduating high school next year, Harry will study for two more years, and the money for college have already been reserved for both of them. Surely, they will be able to contact me any moment, and I will visit my family whenever possible. 

I wasn’t going to say that I was dumping my Wife for an old lover, especially since saying that would be a bit of a stretch. Sure, the public image of same-sex relations is shifting towards greater tolerance, but it doesn’t mean anything for my father, mother, and family in general. Although my nephew, the already mentioned rising star of the world of cool hackers, does not hide that he`s gay among other things, he can afford to turn his back on the family. I think that if there is a small private war between secret services in our country, it would be because of which of them he will be working for. But it seems to me that I have no right to embarrass my parents or my Wife, or put the family business at risk. I just teach in Europe – and no more talking. 

I made it clear to Gwen that there was no need to visit ME. It would be better for her to stay in Boston, under my parent's care. It is fair, I think - they were looking for a daughter for themselves rather than a wife for me, and they found what they needed. Their relationships with Gwen are much better than with me. Personal life of my Wife hasn’t been my concern for a long time. When two people have married, and lived like my Wife and I did, they had better be quiet about each other. There are things one does not drag up into the light for people to laugh at; it’s enough that she is a clever and forward-looking person. Odd, how clearly I`d perceived the indifference she would feel so long as there was no scandal! I don’t want to deprive children or parents of myself; I only want to get my personal freedom and stop lying to anyone. 

This would be better for everyone. Airing dirty laundry is unprofitable for business and bad for business reputation. 

There was one last thing: I had to find out whether someone would share my new life. In fact, I wasn’t sure at all. Regrets and talking is one thing, but it could turn out differently in reality. Can anyone right the wrongs made twenty years ago? Is there anything to right? 

This is why, after contacting Elio via e-mail, one wonderful day in June I came to B., having taken only laptop, sports bag with a minimum of clothes and a present for signora Annella. I also had a gift for Elio, who was turning thirty-seven; I was planning to present it during dinner. From the fact that he was spending more and more time in Italy I concluded that his mother`s condition had worsened, and I appeared to be right. Alzheimer’s disease doesn’t kill momentarily; she can live a few more years. Neighbors and relatives visit her, but she rarely gets up from the bed and barely recognizes anyone. Looking at it is ineffably sad. 

Before going to the villa I took a cab and rode around the neighborhood and visited the city. I took the same road that Elio took me to the first day after my arrival, looked at the same abandoned old railroad, and watched from a distance the belfry of San Giacomo, which we used to call _To-die-for_. I didn’t even expect it all to be so much like before. The belfry, the Piave war memorial, the wasteland with scorched earth, the smell of pines, the concert of cicadas. The driveway leading to the villa. 

I stopped behind the line of trees; as far as I remembered, this was the exact place my car stopped twenty years ago. Elio met me and grabbed my bag; Manfredi and Mafalda shuffled out from the kitchen. Their giddy hugs and kisses distracted me a bit from the one I was literally devouring with my eyes. 

The first meeting after a long break was a hard test for me and him alike. For me probably because he was different again, accidentally or not resembling the previous young Elio. A short haircut, a clean-shaved chin – he didn’t look like Metallica guitarist anymore, even though his bangs remained long and still fell on his eyes all the time. I saw a small scar on his left cheek. Elio was still slim; his jeans fitted him like a second skin and his shirt with an unbuttoned collar… 

_Billowy_. His shirt looked very much like _Billowy_. I wonder whether he keeps the original.

“I'm sure you're dying to see.” He pointed at the garden. 

We worked our way behind the pool, and stopped at the spot where his round table with an umbrella used to stand, and I noticed Elio looking up at the wide open French windows above the balcony. Then we went back into the living room where the old piano stood next to the French windows, and finally returned to the foyer. My things were already in my (his) room; we agreed that I would sleep there. Nothing changed since my last visit: _the orle of paradise_ and the balcony with a view of the sea were still there, and the tilting wicket to the beach squeaking like it used to. The same world I left before, except for Vimini, Anchise, who died of cancer, and the professor. Well, not exactly, now there is a place for Mafalda’s distant relative who does gardening, and for the nurse. 

As we toured the balcony overlooking the huge expanse of blue before us, I leaned on the balustrade. Elio leaned against the wall somewhere behind me, letting me get accustomed to the familiar things again, and I was grateful for the tact he showed. If we started to share impressions right now, I would feel awkward. 

Beneath us was my rock, where I sat at night in fear of the hidden demon, where I and Vimini had whiled away entire afternoons together. 

“She'd be thirty today,” I said. 

“I know.”

“She wrote to me every day. Every single day. Then one day she stopped writing. And I knew. I just knew. I've kept all her letters, you know…” I look around and caught the question in Elio’s eyes. “I've kept yours too.” 

“I have all of yours too. And something else as well. Which I may show you. Later.”

It means he keeps _Billowy_.

“I'd forgotten how much I loved this place. But that’s what I remembered: my paradise was here.” 

When the house was falling silent and the wind danced in the curtains, making the metal rings tinkle on the ledge, and we lay in the same bed and treated each other with slices of fruit. 

And I started to feel, little by little, how the bitter and honey happiness that used to own my heart in full started to drown it, like the creeks that dried out in the summer are slowly filled with moisture when monsoon comes. 

“Are you happy you're back?” Elio asked suddenly. 

He hardly knew that it was more than just happiness - the Promised Land, where the rivers of milk and honey flow, shown to Moses from far away as a promise to give it to his descendants. 

“Are you happy I'm back?” I asked in return. 

The question was straightforward and frank, and it didn’t scare Elio at all; he has always been far braver than me. I read the answer on his face before a word was spoken. I still can see the truth in these eyes, I still can hope… 

“You know I am,” he answered calmly. “More than I ought to be, perhaps.” 

This restraint told me a lot. 

“Me too.”

We walked down and I found myself at the habit of listening again – again! - to the tramp of Elio, who ran after me. And then he also habitually, without thinking, sat down on the high edge of the pool. Elio showed me where he buried some of his father's ashes: under the old lime tree, where the old breakfast table used to be. 

“This was my father's spot. His ghost comes here now when he wants.” He pointed to where the old table used to stand by the pool. “And that’s where my ghost will come someday.” 

“Will there be a place for me?” I asked, half-jokingly, half-seriously. 

He looked up at the balcony again and nodded at the French windows of my (his) room. 

“You'll always have a spot. There.” 

We used to wait for each other on that balcony to go jogging or swimming. It was a bright sunny day today, but for a second, clouds came over the sky; it was hot, but for a second, I felt the streams of a cold rain with my lips. I looked at Elio: his eyes were looking at the balcony as if they saw someone there, and I knew who it was. 

Even if they may throw the church down over me, this won’t keep my ghost from being here with him, especially on rainy days. We will stand on this balcony, embracing each other; and the thunder will rumble above us, but instead of the formidable Dance of the Furies, the surprisingly tender music of Mozart and Chopin will sound for us. 

Once, professor, Elio and I used to talk there often. Now the two of us were talking about professor.

“I know he would have wanted something like this to happen, especially on such a gorgeous summer day.” 

"I am sure he would have.” I paused for a minute. “Where did you bury the rest of the ashes?” 

“Oh, all over. In the Hudson, the Aegean, the Dead Sea. But this is where I come to be with him.” 

I didn’t say anything. What could I say? 

“Come, I'll take you to San Giacomo before you change your mind," he finally said. "There is still time before lunch. Remember the way?”

“I remember.” 

“You remember,” he echoed. 

It cheered me up a little, probably because he answered to me in my own manner. 

The realities were finally merging, and the gap in time began to disappear. The morning of twenty years ago, when we were leaving for Rome, was yesterday, and the tomorrow morning would never come, it seemed. 

“I am like you,” I said. “I remember everything.” 

What did keep me then from reaching out my hand, holding him when he stopped for a moment and looked at me like a deity, in whose power to punish or spare? 

I’ve already said - I’m a coward. I retreat when I have a chance to, I evade reality while I can, and I avoid straightforward talks – always. 

We went for a walk, and then we had a dinner at a festive table, just me and him. The tension disappeared; we were talking friendly, as we used to, about everything and nothing; and then he sat down at the piano. His profile against the background of the light wall was clearly visible from the point on the sofa where I was sitting. In the patio, flowers and vines wrapped around trellises swayed lightly in the evening air. The sky was cloudless, and the mysterious shining was already spreading over its eastern end; the moon was rising. Peace and serenity softened my thoughts and feelings, merging in delightful harmony; the welcome silence, getting deeper as the twilight came, surrounded us, when my favorite pieces, one by one, were given personally to me, and only the darkness of the sitting room covered the tears in my eyes. This evening music spoke to us in a language more expressive than the human one. 

I’ve read and heard many times that Elio is an outstanding performer, and I thought so myself, but I never had an idea that he could perfect his talent even in such a secluded place, without the excitement of the public and clues from the critics. I understood now: people are more focused here; they live more in their inner world – not on the outside, not in the breaks, not in the lightweight and external. It became clear to me that the life in solitude can be desired. Until recently, I wouldn’t have believed that Elio can escape suffering caused by voluntarily forced seclusion. 

Elio started playing _Che faro_ , and I shuddered. I loved that opera of Gluck, and Elio often played for me fragments of it, but never _Che faro _. What prompted him to play one of the saddest arias, the Orpheus’s longing for his beloved, for what cannot be brought back to life by any means?__

____

____

It was dark outside already. Mafalda brought in the candlestick with burning candles and put it on the piano. It was like a signal – Elio got distracted, lost his way, stopped playing and got up. 

“Won’t you finish?” I asked. 

“Too much bitter truth is in this aria,” he answered. “Let’s have a drink instead.” 

“I wanted to give you my present first,” I got out of the soft pillows. “It’s in my bag, upstairs.” 

Elio continued pouring grappa into shots, as if he hadn’t heard anything. Did he take it as a flirt that he didn’t want to respond to? 

“I’ll go get it.” 

I went upstairs, found the flat box into which I had packed the present for safety in my bag, descended the stairs and gave it to Elio. He tore the wrapping paper and took a closer look at an antique postcard in a frame. 

“A long voyage to home,” he smiled and looked at me, as if he suddenly realized something. “So you keep your word then. Well, come on, we need to hang it.” 

Five minutes later, the view of berm where Monet loved to draw took its place. 

“What was here?” I asked, pointing at the light rectangle next to the portrait of his father. 

“Nothing special,” Elio shrugged, but by the sight of him looking away, I knew that he was lying. “Maybe I’ll tell you once, but not now.” 

We went downstairs and entered the patio, holding shots in our hands. The muffled knocking of our heels over the tiles and the cicadas – these were the only sounds of the night that enveloped us. We drank grappa silently and admired the starry sky, but the sadness took possession of me, and my determination evaporated. He said goodbye to me, or rather to what connected us, and made peace. It was all in the past for him. 

***** 

Well, I’ve almost finished this enormously long confession, alone in his (my) bedroom. It's already morning, and I haven't closed my eyes for a second, just gone out to the balcony several times - to smoke a cigarette and rest my eyes and thoughts. I only have to add a couple of paragraphs, put the sheets into the large envelope and put the envelope under the pillow before leaving. I promise I’ll do it. 

And later… what happens _Later_? 

Later, before I`ll go to Mentona, I will have the only chance to tell Elio whereto and wherefore I came. 

I came because he’s still in my heart, and always shall be. 

I came because I wanted and still want to return us to each other, and no matter what we will be – lovers, life partners, or just friends. When I think of us, I imagine not only scenes in the bed – although, frankly speaking, there is, of course, a desire to merge together, - but also a cozy evening spent at an interesting sincere conversation. 

Because the local bank received a fairly solid investment from me – for the future. 

Finally, because I don’t want to be afraid to call him by my name. And come what may. _Dum spíro, spéro_. 

And if I would chicken out again, after my leaving Elio or Mafalda will find the envelope under the pillow. 


	4. What Heaven Gives.

The morning after Elio’s birthday, when descending the stairs for breakfast, I didn’t even think that I would return to this manuscript, which already rested peacefully under the pillow, ever again. Nevertheless, small events, like a tiny grain of sand falling into oversaturated saline solution, can call chain crystallization and actually turn the world upside up.

We sat on the patio at the table; not by each other's side or against each other, but at an angle. It was easier not to meet each other’s glances, because we surely thought about the same thing. We were thinking that a cab would arrive to pick me in an hour, and a whole layer of our lives will perhaps sink into the oblivion. And I was still choosing the right moment for my pathetic speech. I was thrown from one extreme to another: I was telling myself that I came in vain, and then I reminded myself that I had already made enough mistakes in life to be scared of anything now. I seemed to have returned twenty years back, watching Elio from a distance, suffering from my desire and fearing a failure. And he didn’t help at all, rustling a fresh newspaper and drinking coffee, which made him look very much like the professor. 

What should I do? Should I say “Put your newspaper aside, I need to have a serious talk with you?” I shivered, having imagined a similar scene from a Harlequin novel. Should I start suddenly with something like “I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time…”? It'll sound pretty grim. There’s enough frown in our lives already. I could just stand up, go round the table, hug Elio and kiss the top of his head or his temple. But would this silent gesture be enough for the man who has buried the past? And if Elio actually buried his past, then the kiss would probably evoke just condescending pity… That’s what I feared even more than a possible blast of resentment. 

Tortured by these conflicting impulses, I mechanically followed the line of Elio’s neck from the cut of his T-shirt to the back of his head with my eyes and noticed what I failed to notice the day before because he wore a shirt: a visible lack of suntan. It can be found on the sides, below his ear, and on the collarbones, but there are white stripes along his spine (and on his temples, by the way – where was I looking?). 

This means that Elio had a haircut recently. Specifically for my arrival? What else has he done specifically for my arrival? 

Trying not to give out the excitement that aroused in me, I crumpled the napkin and, muttering something like “I’ll be back in a moment”, rushed upstairs – not to my room, but to his new bedroom. All of a sudden I wanted to know what and why he took off the wall of my/his room. 

I closed the door and looked around. It should be something memorable or very dear to him, since it was next to his father’s portrait. If it was signora’s photo, he would have no reason to take it off. So what was it? A photo, another postcard, maybe a note or a letter. Where would I put a dear thing? Hide it in the wardrobe? You don’t put your heart under socks and trunks. Closer, closer… I pulled out the drawer of the bedside table. There was a framed photograph there, which I took out. Its size corresponded exactly to the light spot near professor’s portrait.

My own face was looking at me. I could even tell the time when it was taken because I recognized a part of the slide behind my back; I often showed it to my students. Four or five years ago, in Harvard, when Elio came to visit me. 

If MY OWN past is being hidden from ME, it is not the past – it is present! It’s not too late… 

The door opened. Elio entered the room, saw the photo in my hands, saw the open drawer and leaned against the door, folding his arms and catching my look boldly. He clearly wasn’t going to explain the difficult situation, giving me the honor to do this. We looked at each other for a minute; then I carefully put the card on the table and embraced Elio, forgetting all of the words I prepared in advance. 

“I’m not going anywhere.”

For a moment it seemed that he, too, forgot about everything in the world, burying his forehead in my shoulder like he used to do… but no. He freed himself. Now he avoided my look. 

“This doesn’t oblige you to do anything. Don’t make everything worse than it is.” 

I took his face with my hands, forcing Elio to look me in the eye. Loneliness, sadness, and expectation that were hidden yesterday behind the joy of me coming back. 

“The musical genius has a hearing problem? I said. I. Am. Not. Going. Anywhere.” 

I was stroking his neck with my thumbs and felt him swallow. His eyes were so close that I could see every green spot on his light hazelnut iris. I saw the sadness give way to hesitation. 

“Wait, wait… do you…”

“I do.”

“Do you want…” He took a breath. “No, you say what you want because I…” 

And I said. It finally broke out of me; I was talking without stopping. About what happened to my life since the time of our last encounter, my future work, my plans. The only thing I kept hidden was the results of my visit to the family doctor; I didn’t want to make Elio think that he owed me anything. 

The reaction was not what I expected it would be. He wasn’t joyful; instead, he lowered his head and started thinking. 

“Wasn’t it your favorite Heraclitus who said everything is unique, like water in the river?” 

“Wouldn’t it be a bigger mistake to try and correct a mistake?” I saw all of Elio’s thoughts clearly before me; he didn’t believe in the future, and he didn’t believe in me, but I didn’t think of stopping. Odd, how his fear gave me courage. As for Heraclitus… I couldn’t keep from smiling. 

“I’ve had to shovel the rubbish in the heads of all sorts of young oafs for twenty years, but you! I guess you leave me no choice. You gave me a private music lesson yesterday; I’ll teach you philosophy today. Let’s go.” I dragged him to the balcony. 

Elio followed me without objecting. I stopped in the far corner, from where the bay was best seen. 

“Look there. What do you see?”

Elio looked at me with suspicion, as if he doubted the sanity of my mind. 

“The sea, the Mediterranean one. The Ligurian, to be more precise,” he answered in a voice of a diligent student. “Common pine, Pínus sylvéstris, European olives, Olea europaea, and this is chestnut, in Latin, it would be, hold on, Castánea…”

I laughed and raised my hands in defeat.

“Enough with the chestnuts; let’s stop at the sea, since there’s no river at hand,” I looked at him, adjusting my imaginary pince-nez like a lecturer. “Some peoples worshiped the sea as a god, others came to it like to a friend; some faced it as an enemy. They tried to propitiate the sea with sacrifices, and it was not always wine… There’s nothing as volatile as it. The underwater streams, ebbs and flows, storms and lulls change its face every second. It is insidious, like its waves, and tender as the gentlest lover. However can you say that you’ve ever seen the sea we call the Mediterranean to change its nature and stop being itself?” 

“Are you expecting an answer to this rhetorical question, philosopher?” 

“No. As a matter of fact, Heraclitus was both right and wrong. It happens sometimes, you know. If we take a sea or a river as a combination of facts and details, such as the water level, the salt content or the precise number of bacteria, you can’t enter the same water once, let alone twice. Right?” 

He nodded.

“A river remains a river, and a sea remains a sea, whatever streams run there, and whatever color their waters are dyed. For when we say “river”, we already conquer from the time a constant and forever unchanged concept of something flowing.” 

I turned Elio towards myself and put my hands on his shoulders.

“The meaning of the river flowing is not that all thing are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice; but that some things stay the same only by changing. Our…” I stumbled. “What we had in those summer weeks is like stars. They never went out. Even when the clouds hid them, we knew they were in the sky.” 

“Or it’s all just nostalgia,” Elio answered quietly. “It happens when you meet a bright, wholesome person, be it a man or a woman. Such goose – do you remember that you used to call me that? – feels as if he didn’t live before that. You will miss that person, whether you want it or not."

“If you mean merely yearning for the time that passed, then I have to disagree,” I retorted. “I wouldn’t have bothered you and myself alike if the dead past had buried its dead. But if you mean yearning for the time that passed in vain because we failed to trust in our spiritual forces, gather them and do what needed to be done, then yes.” 

“So you left your wife because you finally realized that you want to sleep with men?”

Well, you know, even such a coward and a philosopher as me can lose his patience.

“I want to sleep with you, you goose! And with you only! I won’t let you hide from the truth for another second: I. LOVE. YOU. What do I have to do to make you believe?!” 

That’s it! I’ve said it, and I will say it again if I need to. I will scream about it until I get hoarse, or until there’s not a single drop of hope in my heart. 

This is probably the only way to banish cowardice. Illuminate with bright light every corner it could sneak into. Nail the flag to the mast to avoid the temptation of pulling it down, to resist fear that has already deprived us of our future once. 

The impressiveness of my Declaration of Independence had a strange effect on Elio: he turned around, throwing my hands away rapidly, and stared at the sea. For a moment, I didn’t understand anything – until I saw a lonely tear running down his cheek. 

When you’re seventeen, tears run and dry out easily, but when you’re pushing forty, they burn your eyes and leave your heart scarred. Who knows this better than me? I carefully embraced Elio from the back. 

“I missed the cicadas,” I said. I wiped this tear out with my lips; the kiss was innocent and restrained, but even more sensual because of it. “I don’t want to live without _orle of paradise_ , the burning sun and our night walks. Without Monet’s berm. Without you.” 

Elio kept silence, but when he finally spoke, his voice was trembling. 

“Are you offering what I think you're offering?” 

“Yes. But not right now, as you’re right about one thing. We need to know each other anew.” 

He laid his hand on mine, with which I leaned on the balcony's handrail, and connected our fingers into a warm hub. I needed no other answer. He was my Elio; the one who thought and felt like me. 

*****

I could write another novel of a decent volume about what happened in the following two years, but I’m not exactly thrilled by the thought of spending one or two more sleepless nights at the writing table. If I lose sleep, I’d better lose it over something more pleasant. 

I left for Mentona and came back shortly. To Mafalda’s great joy, we spent the summer at the villa. Although we tried not to behave like a couple, it was fairly evident: after seeing me you could tell for sure that Elio was not more than three meters away. We avoided reproducing in detail everything we used to do, but bikes, swimming, music, and books were always at our disposal. We often sat in _orle of paradise_ with our books and lemonades, but the difference was that the thin tread stretching between us, which we used to find and lose before, turned into an unbreakable link, and that we could exchange smiles and looks without the need to think about their causes and motives. The balcony, where the windows of our rooms led, shielded us from the whole world as it did before. The bed remained separate: life has taught me that sex itself cannot solve problems and only creates new ones, and so I waited. I was trying to persuade myself that friendship will be more than enough for me. 

This strategy failed to stand the test of time twenty years ago, and now it has failed again. I finally waited for the evening (maybe six or seven days later) when we both stopped pretending not to notice the sensual, acute and bright atmosphere surrounding us. When wishing him goodnight I kept his loving look and understood – don’t ask me how – that it was the time: either say it or remain mute forever. And I pulled Elio to me, grabbed his dark curls with my fingers and whispered:

“Fuck me, Oliver!”

And he kissed me back with such abandon that all the pictures that had been playing in my imagination for several days instantly fell out of my head. Memories of our past meetings? Crazy night fantasies? How can I care for them, when my happiness is in my hands, whispering something hoarsely and breathing hardly through the clenched teeth? 

The heat made my lips dry in a second. Only greedy, almost beastly hungry feelings - leaning forward skin to skin, remembering the taste, as I’ve already remembered the smell, giving myself to him and taking him forever. Returning what is mine by the will of Heaven, and will be mine forever, diving into the hot closeness and diving out, not seeing anything except for scattered distant stars. Ignoring everything, even my own screams. If we stopped, I would die, and only by an insane effort of will, I was holding on the edge, on the thin line of consciousness, praying for it to never end… never… end… And I finally fell into the abyss, taking him with me. 

I woke up in the morning from someone stroking my back – lightly, as if with a feather. I was slowly swimming out of the night dreams. A faint noise of the sea, barely felt the movement of the air, a light tinkling of the curtain rings. It seemed that the world stopped talking. I opened my eyes and looked around at the scenery, which was already habitual. My/his room, my/his bed; everything is painfully familiar. Only the heaviness of another body is felt nearby, but my heart is not worried at all and beats evenly and calmly. As if it knows: everything is where it should be, and I finally came back home. Actually, I thought, I have never left this place. 

I didn’t remember at all how we moved from the patio into the bed yesterday. Elio’s not that skinny teenager anymore; he could easily bring me here with his hands. Bridal style. By the way, where’s he? 

I rolled around. Here he was, lying on his side, leaning his head on the hand, looking thoughtfully and with seriousness. The bed sheet barely covered his naked body, but he wasn't embarrassed by it at all. He was beautiful, madly beautiful. A strand of hair hung over his eyes. I stretched my hand and tucked it behind his ear; he managed to rub my hand with the bristle that had grown overnight. 

“When you woke up THAT morning, you hated me for what we did. Don’t say you regret it again.” 

“No, not at all.” He sighed. “I’m just happy now, impossibly. I’m even afraid of this happiness if you want to know. It is… too huge, I don’t deserve it.” 

His last words went to my shoulder, since I pulled him to me. I wish I knew how many winters must bury me under the cold drifts before freezing out the memory of how right it feels to be whole. 

“If anything, I’m the one who doesn’t deserve it. I remember everything, remember crushing you inside me. One can live without a soul, and it’s rather convenient, but now it hurts me that I could.” 

“That much?”

"As if a half of my lung turned into a piece of ice."

He kissed my chest right above my heart and leaned his cheek on it. 

“And now?”

“It is better, but… you know it’s true. I was trying to abandon you.” 

“Did you manage?”

“As if I would be here… Did you try?”

A sigh. A pause. A short laugh.

“All these years, whenever I thought of you, I'd think either of B. or of our last days in Rome. I used to come there and… I couldn’t look down without seeing your face on the ancient slate pavement. Everything reminded me how I finally had encountered the life that was right for me but my weak hands failed to have…” 

“Everyone would wish they were that weak,” I thought. 

“I could never think of you in New England, even though there were barely fifty miles between us, and I continued to imagine you stuck in Italy somewhere, unreal and spectral. Do these attempts count?” 

“And then you came to me…”

“And then I came, and you became real. You`re so… so amazingly handsome still, no loss of hair, no fat, skin still as smooth as then. God, how I wanted to kiss each one of your sunspots…” 

My heart was so filled with love that I was seriously afraid that it would explode. I should’ve nailed steel hoops on it, like on a barrel. 

“And then you took a picture of me.”

“Even before I came up to you after the lecture. I didn’t want to forget anymore. I hoped that your face and the face of my father would be the last…” 

I couldn’t hear IT anymore. I rolled him over on his back, covered his eyes, cheeks, lips, and hair with kisses. 

“I want you,” I muttered like a madman. “I want you, I want you…” 

In a hundred or two hundred years, people, according to Harry, to boldly go where no man has gone before, to explore strange new worlds, become wiser and closer to perfection. I can believe that, but I don’t believe they will ever be happier, oh no. 

*****

We actually had to get to know each other anew. The life was not standing still, however strongly we wanted it to freeze. 

The ghosts who had inhabited the pool, the garden, the house, the tennis court and even _orle of paradise_ over the long years, weren’t going to leave their usual spots so quickly. Many times I have seen Elio look thoughtfully at the old lime tree, at the balcony where the wind waved the curtains, and he shuddered slightly and smiled whenever I appeared. He was clearly possessed by some memories of his father, of signora, of Ancise, of me, perhaps, or of Vimini, and he didn’t want to explain it plainly. 

I learned that Elio never got rid of his habit of chewing something in bed; however annoying the crumbs in bed were, I curbed this irritation and threw Elio, and then the crumbs, out of the bed with laughter. 

He reacted too vehemently to some of my remarks, and it took me some time and a couple of unpleasant spats to understand that he didn’t like the tone I was making them in. The years of teaching and raising my sons left their imprint; without knowing it, I acquired a habit of mentoring. Thus, I had to watch myself more carefully. 

I also discovered more serious things.

Elio is used to working as hard as some people drink, and it’s better not to disturb him during such period. Take offense or not, but he either mumbles something, annoyed, or keeps silence, completely ignoring me, and small marks appear on the lines of the notebook. If he has a creative bout, he can forget even about food and sleeping, and I discovered experimentally that the only way to make him eat something during such time was to feed him in bed. By the way, the Muse can visit him anywhere and anytime; it has even torn him out of my arms, or when he jumped up at night, puzzling me even more. But later, when the bout is gone, he flies without wings (and I fly with him), and we can stay in bed for days, as if it is the summer of '83 again.

We don’t make such crazy things as we did before, but we always remember about them. A look, which we exchange lying on the grass in berm, or the clouds covering the sky, are enough to push us into the hands of each other. But our passion is no longer painted in fiery red shades of despair; it is pearly and honey now, like tenderness and languor. 

We realized that we became jealous! Was it our age, or the bitter experience, I can’t say. We didn’t have it before, and we carelessly mentioned our passing flings in our talks. Thank God, we were clever enough to find out why such mentions made our relationship shake all over. We agreed not to let this snake into our Garden of Eden ever again, leave those who taught us something in the past and take only the acquired experience. 

Unwilling to spoil Elio’s mood unnecessarily with memories of my family, I always went out when someone from the family called me to talk. The talks weren’t always pleasant, especially with my parents, and Elio learned to understand my irritation when he asked questions. At least I thought he learned to understand.

In 2004, on New Year’s Eve, our first major quarrel happened; perhaps if we didn’t stop on time, our relations would have ended. 

I was planning to spend the end of the year with my parents, wife, and sons and get back by December 31. I stayed in my house in Boston; if I was smarter, I would’ve checked in a hotel. And while I was staying there, Kylie’s upcoming engagement struck me like a bolt out of the blue, and she asked me to stay. I couldn’t say no to my only niece. I warned Elio that for family reasons I would come later, without giving any details; I still wasn’t sure that he would perceive my family without bitterness or apprehension. I called him on his cell phone shortly before my departure from the States, but he declined the call. I thought he was having another creative bout. “Okay,” I thought and called him again from London, where I had a transfer. He declined the call once again. I called again when I got to the Christopher Columbus airport in Genoa… and I kept calling until I started to worry. Did he smash the phone against the wall? Or drowned it in the bath? 

But the biggest surprise was waiting for me at the villa. Elio disappeared. Just went somewhere in the morning three days ago and didn’t come back. Mafalda and Manfredi welcomed me as if I was the Savior. 

“Did you contact the police?” I asked. 

“ _Si, Signor Ulliva,_ sure.” Mafalda, worrying, mixed English words with Italian. “They searched the whole B. and all the roads. They found his _motocicletta_ , black with a silver fender, on the parking lot of the hotel.” 

Elio has a car, BMW sports coupe, and a trail bike, which he keeps at the villa. 

I personally went to the commissariat of B. and discovered that two days before Elio had spent almost a day in the bar, and then hanged out in the club that replaced _Le Danzing_ , where a local band played at the time. People in both places spoke with one voice that Elio was pissed drunk. No one remembered where he went after the club. 

I started to suspect that I had something to do with his breakdown, and I wanted to find Elio at any cost. If he stayed for the night at some woman’s place, which he had picked up at the club,… the idea evoked a burst of jealousy in me, but this was what I would prefer. He would have been long awake by now, and someone would have seen him in the city the next day. 

Having understood that Elio probably wasn’t in B., I thought about the nearest city of N. It was fifteen minutes of fast driving, and I was driving so fast that I nearly fell into the sea, losing control of the car on the wavy highway. I got out of the habit of driving Italian roads; in Germany, just like in the USA, the roads are much straighter. 

I arrived in N. by the evening and started to crawl slowly through the narrow streets and look around in search of a clue. Realizing that I would either just crash into a wall or hurt someone, I left the car on one of the central streets and went on foot. It was already dark; the shops that had been decorated for Christmas were shining with all the colors of the rainbow, a rumble of voices was everywhere, and organ music was playing from the loudspeaker installed on a church building. I looked into it, not sure why, just in case. The service was over, and the benches were empty, but I still searched all corners. It was empty. 

I decided that I needed not a temple of God, but a temple of Dionysus, and started walking around bars. I found what I was looking for in the fifth one. It wasn’t even a bar, rather a club: musical instruments on the stage, a mixing console, and lighting gadgets. Elio was sitting with a group of some freaks, melancholically playing Credence Clearwater on the guitar (after seeing me he switched to Money by Pink Floyd); he looked as if the commissariat might well be interested in him as in a possible client. 

My arrival didn’t make him happy. He looked at me angrily through his uncombed dark strains hanging over his eyes, and I heard the words “traitor” “came at last” and “screwed…” 

Since there was no point in talking to a drunken man (I sincerely hoped that Elio’s condition was caused by excessive drinking and not by drugs), I used force – physical, mainly. If he wasn’t so drunk, I would have paid a lot for that; Elio was not weaker than me, and the guys from the band also got involved. They had just found a guy who played guitar and piano like Apollo, and they apparently had their objections to the forced interruption of their cooperation. But at least I could talk to THEM! When I explained that Elio had joined them solely under the effect of difficult life circumstances, they agreed that it wouldn’t be for long. 

“La-di-da!” One of them, the shaggiest, expressed the common disappointment. "Your friend is cool. I never heard half of the riffs he showed us."

I wouldn’t have been able to bring Elio home safely; so I started to sober him up immediately. You master all kind of skills when you have to deal with two teenage sons. I admit that my methods weren’t exactly sophisticated, but I achieved my goal and took him to the car after procedures, where he fell asleep. 

Mafalda and Manfredi both stayed up while I was running God knows where; they helped me drag Elio into the shower and put him to bed afterwards, notably – with no groans and gasps. She’s a wise woman, Mafalda. As for me, I worked up my anger so much by the morning that there was no trace of wisdom at all. 

I slept awfully. Early in the morning – it was still dark – I heard the French window creak wide open. Pulling up trousers and putting on the first shirt I found, I jumped out to the balcony. Elio was smoking. He only had jeans and an old sweater with a stretched collar on. He was clearly suffering from a hangover, judging by the trembling of his fingers. His eyes were glistening badly. 

“Get in the house, now,” I ordered sharply. It will be the worst if he catches a cold because of me. “You shouldn’t have…” 

Elio exploded like a supernova, instantly forgetting about his hangover, and in a minute a wonderful scandal was raging on the balcony. 

“Why the hell are you interfering in my life?!” he shouted. “Why don’t you ask for a change what I want?!” 

He got carried away. He screamed with inspiration, and his voice was sliding down to the infrasound and then bordering on ultrasound; uneven stains of the blush appeared on his cheeks. What right did I have to prevent him from spending time with whoever he wanted, when I am no saint myself, and I can go straight away under my wife’s heel, and who was I in this life – I couldn’t even have guessed some of these – and, finally, the offer to take the famous route and stop torturing myself and him. I’ll admit, I wanted to follow his advice and slam the door, but I held back. 

“Did you want to get drunk?” I asked sarcastically instead. “You should’ve waited for me, I’ve got a reason, and we could do it together. Use your brains sometimes, for you’ve made up God knows what!” 

“What was I supposed to think, what?!” Elio yelled into my face. “You never explained anything, but I heard the joy in your voice. You were happy to stay there for a bit longer! And I also heard the happy female voices! If something bad had happened, you wouldn’t be having fun!” 

I didn’t know anymore whether to laugh or to cry: this is what he’s like, my Elio - strong and fragile at the same time. Like a crystal ball. I’ve never seen him like that before, and I was truly charmed.

Of course, the sensitivity that was typical of him in his youth inevitably had to give up under the pressure of life’s lessons, put itself under the elastic shell, but there is no doubt that there had to be two or three places where it was possible to penetrate this shell and touch the sensitive point hidden in the very core. 

I've never had any experience of love scandals, because in my families they don’t happen - people either hiss like snakes or call the police. But everything happens for the first time…

“My niece is getting married!” I shouted at him. “At her own will, God damn you! Of course, how would you understand? You were never pushed into this arena like a gladiator!” 

“How could I know this, tell me? Am I a telepath, or did my third eye open, and I didn’t notice it?” He rushed into my room, to the mirror. “Let’s have a look…” 

I caught him halfway and shook him. 

“Stop the hysterics! You’re acting like a toddler!”

“And you’re acting like a father! Disappointed with your son?” 

“I’ll show you what kind of father I am to you!” I pulled him to myself and kissed his lips as strongly as if I got an alternative breathing system and didn’t need my lungs anymore. Elio gasped silently, and in a moment his tongue was already dancing in my mouth, and something hard pressed into my thigh. A push – and we rush into the room, stumble on the doorstep and, holding each other, fall down, nearly crashing the bed frame with our heads. That’s fine; the carpet was good enough for the first time. 

It was too early to get up. We lay across the bed, and I watched Elio dozing by my side, smiling dreamingly. His chest went up and down; his hair was scattered across the bed sheet, and wrinkles on his forehead smoothed out. I was thinking of what he saw, where his dreams were heading. Did he see our common house sometime later; did he swim in the sea or was lazing under the sunlight?

He’s actually right. It’s time to stop going to another room when someone calls me on the cell. Nothing good came out of these queries anyway. And I shall stop making a secret out of my family. This is not to say that we have to organize a joint trip to Boston, of course, but it was necessary to acquaint Elio with them – in absentia, so to speak. And we shall also clarify certain issues in the process. 

“I didn’t know that you were good at rock music,” I said at breakfast. “That guy was talking about guitar riffs.” 

“It sort of happened, I was into it,” Elio answered, spreading the chocolate paste over a piece of toast. “I did some arrangements for one band and even played solo guitar for them for some time. That's how I got this scar.” He touched his chin with a finger, answering my second unspoken question in advance. “I pulled a string too tightly, and it broke.” 

“How many interesting things I don’t know about you?” 

“You know the main thing.” He leaned over the table to my ear. "You know such places on my body that you can touch and make me your humble slave.” 

I covered his hand with mine, but I didn’t want to get caught in this trick and turn away from the road of explanations. 

“You’re a diagnosis, Elio. Next time, just ask me before imagining fears of all kinds.” 

“And you, Oliver, are a way of life. Next time just say everything as it is. Deal?” 

“Deal.” 

We went to the patio to smoke. The winter air was clear and still, and the sky was farther than in summer, when it seemed to descend and caress us in its embrace. 

The New Year has already come, but the holidays went on. We used that time to enjoy talking, to get drunk of each other for the future. We saw each other during the school year, but not as often as we wanted. And now we spent our evenings by the fireplace, reading; Elio played me something every day; he couldn’t spend a single day without guitar or piano. I received the grandfather’s album from the States, and I told Elio about my family - about my granny and her medallion with the motto of “No one shall put me in a cage”; about my grandfather, parents and other relatives, and most of all about Harry and Josh: I felt that Elio would meet them one day. 

“I somehow think that your grandfather would’ve understood back then,” Elio said. “Judging by your stories, he was very supportive of you. And this last will…”

“We can’t ask him now, but... If I simply said I wanted to get married the one I loved, he would have supported me. But I can’t imagine that he would approve of… of you,” I sighed. "I’m sure he didn’t know anything about you; he just thought that it was not all right with my wife and me. He could tell a heavy mosaic pseudo-Chinese vase from a bowl of pure gold.” 

“And your sons? Will you tell them?” 

“If you want me to.” 

Elio was thinking and looking at the fire; yellow, red and orange reflections turned his eyes into melted gold. 

“You will if there is no other way. I don’t know if we would understand in their age if it was about our parents. Although, the times are changing… What seemed to be wild twenty years ago is not surprising anymore.”

“But it still makes people want to step back.”

The equilibrium was restored little by little at the new level altogether. We both drew conclusions from this quarrel, and our relations became more… not more sincere, we didn’t lie to each other anyway; but there were more openness and less misunderstanding. When I came to the US, I lived at Elio’s, and the sound of the distant siren of Cape Cod woke us up on foggy nights. Elio said that after many years it became something like the knocking of Anchise’s hammer or the buzz of his saw, something that gave him the feeling of peace and harmony with the world. From there I used to visit my parents and my family, spending nights in my grandfather’s house whenever necessary. It was more spacious than our house, and I even provided it for my niece’s wedding in August; I honestly informed Elio about that. He shrugged.

“Your word is enough. I don’t need truth for the sake of truth.” 

Shortly before the next Christmas Josh called me. He graduated from high school in the spring, took a pause and had been driving around Europe for several months with his sketchbook, pencils, laptop and the desire to see the architecture of the Old World and its educational institutions. He contacted several architectural offices in Munich and Delft via Internet, worked there for a bit and thus provided himself during this educational trip. Now he was aiming at Italy and offered to celebrate Christmas together. 

I was a bit puzzled. We always spent the summer and the Christmas holidays at the villa. That was what we were going to do that time as well, and I didn’t know what Elio would think about my son's presence. But my beloved surprised me once again. 

“Sure, let him come.”

I hesitated, and sensitive Elio understood the reason behind this hesitation. 

“I’ll move to my parents’ former bedroom on the ground floor and leave mine to Josh. I guess you don’t want to inform him about certain aspects of our relationships.” 

And I actually didn’t want to. Having communicated with students for many years, I couldn’t help noticing that young people of 18 years and older have three qualities that I couldn’t discover in myself when I was their age. Firstly, they think very quickly, like a good computer. Secondly, they are phenomenally empathic and thus much more prone to mutual understanding. Thirdly, they are much freer than I used to be. Nevertheless, I smiled, having imagined myself talking to my son. “Do you remember this house? We stayed here when you were eight years old. Do you know why we came here then? We came because when its current host was even younger than you are now I stayed here for several weeks, and we had an affair. Every night he sneaked into my room, and we fucked our brains out. So shake his hand and be good.” 

“Not yet. You’re not offended, right?”

“Everything’s fine, Oliver, really. I’ll wait for a couple of nights. But no longer!” 

I understood him well. During the semester, we mostly lived in different places and waited impatiently for a chance to finally share a bed, even if we were tired so much in the evening that nothing special happened in that bed until the morning.

The two days that Josh spent in our house flew by. He quickly found common ground with Elio, and by the evening they were already digging in journals in the professor’s study, exchanging sophisticated phrases. Then Elio tried to find some information, using the old phone books. I was informed about the result the next day. 

“I have time for four months of the course in the Italian language at the Technical University of Milan,” Josh said. “At the same time I will be working in an architectural office; Mr. Perlman has advised it to me. If the acceptance committee is happy with my CV, maybe I will study at this university later. Of course, it’s possible to take classes in English, but I want to speak Italian.” 

Josh kept himself flawlessly; he was imperturbable and businesslike, but I knew my son well. He didn’t ask a single question of those that anyone would’ve asked. Such lack of interest is more typical of Harry; in Josh, it indicated that his brain was working hard, sorting out the new information. I suspected a trap, but he didn’t say another word that time. 

*****

Elio has had a difficult time for all this year. I saw what was happening to him: insomnia, loss of weight, trembling of hands and the eyes staring somewhere inside him. Frankly speaking, he looked like my older brother. The furies, which filled the brain of his sick mother, chose him as their target, and I was worried for some time that his creative bouts will turn into drinking ones, but I couldn’t abandon my work. Signora died in the spring; this family tragedy was for the better for us all in the end probably. In early June I took Elio to a trip to Asia. We came back in July. The change of scenery helped: Elio freshened, cheered up and seemed to have lost ten years. 

And in the same July Josh visited us. He arrived unexpectedly, when Elio left for work for three days. The previous time my son came it was winter, so now I could finally show him B., walk with him along the coastline. We took the usual pathway down to the beach, swam and even climbed the rock that I and Elio reached in the morning after our first night together.

“This is where you sat when we came here with Harry,” Josh said later thoughtfully, pointing at my and Vimini’s stone. Indeed, it was so: I sunbathed there, watching my sons splash in the shallows. “I understand why you come here so often. It’s very beautiful and the house is so nice…” 

In the morning I heard him speak good Italian, with taffeta phrases, asking to help Mafalda cook agnolotti stuffed ossobuco, and the fact that she allowed him to roll the dough shall be considered a success; she rarely let anyone in the kitchen. I suddenly started suspecting that it was not simply a courtesy call or a desire to see me, but that my son had something in mind. Nevertheless, I managed to hold back the question that was dancing at the tip of my tongue, and kept performing duties of the host. However, I was taken by surprise when I sat on the sofa with a book in the evening after the dinner, and my son asked me without any forewords: 

“Don’t you want to tell me the truth?”

I pricked my ears.

“What kind of truth do you want to hear?” 

Josh sat down on the other edge of the sofa, keeping his eyes on me. 

“That you and Mr. Perlman, Elio, are a couple.” 

_Here it is._

“Well, let’s say we are,” I said slowly and put aside _La Dame aux camelias_. “Does it offend you? Shock you?” 

“I’m twenty, dad, not twelve. But don’t you think you could’ve told me yourself? By the way, the same with Harry. He’s eighteen, and he has a right to know. Sooner or later someone will guess it like I did. It’s not that pleasant to hear such things about your own father from somebody else.” 

I stood up.

“How long have you known?”

“Fairly long.”

He brought his backpack, rummaged in it for a while and took out the sketchbook that he always had with him everywhere, and then took out several folded sheets of paper from the sketchbook. I unfolded them and instantly recognized what they were – photocopies of five Elio’s letters, except for the last one, that was kept in the personal home safe in the thick pile of Vimini’s letters. 

“Do you remember asking me to take grandfather’s family album from the safe?” 

Indeed, after the wonderful scandal about Kylie’s engagement, I told Josh the code for the safe and asked to send me the album. I should’ve asked Harry, but he went to his friends at that time. 

“And did you read the letters? I didn’t ask you that!”

“Blame it on yourself, you freaking conspirator,” Josh retorted calmly. “You tied the ribbon badly and put the album under the letters. When I pulled it out, the whole pile scattered right before my feet. I saw letters from a woman and thought she was your mistress. The one you left mother and us for. I knew that there was something behind your move for Europe,” he continued, while I was looking through the letters that I knew by heart. “You didn’t explain anything; mother was sending me to you for the answers, grandpa and grandma exchanged glances or kept silent. Sorry, but I had to find it out myself.” 

“So, what did you find out?”

“I looked through several letters of that… Vimini, right?” 

With my mind’s eye, I saw Vimini laughing, reaching out her hands for me to help her step down from a big stone. 

“She lived here, nearby. She died long ago.” 

“She did? I didn’t know, sorry…” 

“Sure you didn’t. She couldn’t have sent me a notice of her own death. Go on.” 

“The handwriting on the envelopes was female, but the letters were written not even by a young woman, but a little girl. You aren’t a pedophile, are you?” Josh raised his eyebrow sarcastically. No parent can have his head in the clouds for too long if he has grown-up kids, I thought. “And then, while collecting the letters, I found one that was written by a man. I remember thinking: why was it there if you keep all your business correspondence on your writing desk. I read it and understood immediately that this guy was madly in love with you. 

I remembered well that we had agreed to write alertly and always followed that rule. My name as a signature in his letter, his name as a signature in mine – the only hints at our affair we allowed ourselves. 

“Where did he write about it?” 

Josh rolled his eyes.

“Dad, he wrote about it in every word, in every line. And you kept these letters locked in the safe, and he signed them with your name.” 

“You understood that too?”

“Of course I did. Wouldn’t you suspect the truth in my place?” 

I looked away. The ghost of immense happiness, which only happens in early youth, came up to me and gently touched my cheek. I’m happy now, too, but in another way: in spite of, not thanks to. 

“When I came here for Christmas, it took me ten minutes of watching you to realize who wrote those letters and why you left us.” 

“And you kept silent for six months?” 

“Your silence lasted longer,” Josh remarked justly. 

“Did you tell anyone?” 

He shook his head. 

“Not even a hint, not to any living soul, even to Harry. My word.” 

“Fine,” I gave up. “Call Harry, let him come visit us. This is a long story, and I don’t want to retell it twice.” 

I remembered this very letter that I had written for Elio two years ago. It still was in the same envelope, only the envelope itself was in the depository of local bank together with some documents. 

Elio came back the other day. I met him in B. and told him that it was the moment of truth, handing him my letter in conclusion. 

“I wrote it all for you, but it appears that it was for them. There’s so much private information here that I must ask for your permission.” 

At the sight of a fairly thick pile of sheets, Elio’s eyebrows went up. 

“Let’s go to our place.” We called “our place” the Monet`s berm where our love had first spoken authoritatively, from one heart to another. “I definitely won’t cope with it on the fly.” 

We settled down in the shade of pines, on soft grass. I had enough time to sleep before Elio touched my shoulder. His glare didn’t promise anything good.

“Why didn’t you say that you had heart issues?” 

Well, that’s a surprise. It appears there’s something I haven’t told Elio over these two years. 

“I didn’t want you to think that I came to you to die,” I answered sincerely. “Moreover, I’ve undergone a treatment course, and my cardiogram has been normal for more than half a year. Happiness cures greatly.” 

“Well, you still shall stop smoking that much,” Elio muttered, disarmed. 

“I’ve already cut down the number of cigarettes. Really, what do you say? Shall I give it to them?” 

Elio looked through the pages.

“I understand your decision, it would actually be easier. You wrote it wonderfully; I don’t even remember the half of it.”

“You could tell your story of our romance,” I suggested. “For me. But are you sure you don’t want to blank something out? Or just say a word…” I took a lighter from my pocket. “Say a word and it will turn to ashes. I’ll just say that I loved you and that I do now.” 

Elio looked through the letter once again, then reached out and kissed me – long and languidly, as he alone could. 

“As you remember, it was enough for me.” He leaned over and pressed me to the ground with his entire body. It was a pleasant heaviness. “But you will speak about their mother, even if you don’t say her name once,” he touched my closed eyelids with his lips. “For those who have no experience, love is only a word, without its glory or bitterness. If you want understanding, they must know.” He put aside the sheets. “Come to me, Elio.” 

I wonder why I thought that when I would be forty-seven, and he would be forty, we would be too old to care? I’m forty-six, he’s thirty-nine, but I’m starting to think that I will care until the last breath. 

The next day, Harry’s appearance in the doorway of the living room caused a slight shock: Mafalda, who just came to say that the lunch was seven minutes late and who had somewhat lost her sight over the years, crossed herself; Elio rapidly straightened his back and even got up from his chair. I guess I underestimated the degree of similarity between me and the matured son. 

Once we talked about _The Well-Beloved_ , a novel by Thomas Hardy. It was about a man who falls in love with a woman who, years after leaving him, dies. He visits her house and ends up meeting her daughter, with whom he falls in love. 

“I wouldn’t want one of my sons in your bed,” I said then. I hope I didn’t program their future back then. However, as far as I knew, neither Josh nor Harry shared my inclination in that field. I tried to be not just a strict father – it is necessary, however you look at that – but also a friend for my boys. 

“I promised to tell,” I said to Josh, suppressing the jealous feeling. “But I chose to write.”

Josh, as a senior, took the envelope and nodded to his brother, inviting him to follow. We went out to the patio and watched them run down the pathway to the sea, jumping over the gate instead of opening it. 

“Perverse like their father,” Elio teased me. 

I only managed to look back at him.

“Are you afraid?” He moved closer. 

It would be silly to deny it – I was indeed afraid. It’s strange. I could tell the story to anyone if I weren’t afraid that it would affect my wife and parents, but I waited for the judgment of the closest ones with anxiety. 

Elio laid his palm on my hand, lying still on the balustrade. We stood a bit, watching the boys settle on the rocks and read, passing sheets to each other. 

“They’ll understand. Let’s go. Today we’re having lasagna.” 

As long as Mafalda is in charge of the kitchen in this house, there will be no lasagna buy in supermarket such an eerie profanity as Americano on this table. 

Josh and Harry, who came back after quite a long time, found us in the living room: Elio was at the piano, I – in the armchair nearby. Upon their appearance, we both stood up. 

Josh didn’t say anything; he just came up to Elio and reached out his hand for a handshake. Harry gave the letter to me and said mysteriously: 

“Well, after all we are what we are, and if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them. Yours can be no worse than someone else's.” 

The phrase seemed vaguely familiar to me. 

“Who said that?”

“One man, or, to be precise, half-man.”

“I see, some science fiction again,” I thought. 

“Can I ask you?” Harry continued. “Are you planning to get divorced?” 

There was a cautious concern in his voice, and I thought that I caught the implication: since last year, same-sex marriages were officially permitted in the states of Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Maine. We already discussed it with Elio, but we both decided that we would continue to testify our relationship as we had done before with our faith, when we wore chains with the Stars of David – not hiding, but tucked away. 

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because only the one whom I gave the word can give it back. Moreover, I don’t want to downplay my fault.” 

_Because a coward cripples not only his life, but lives of others as well._

“Dad, come on, really!” Harry exclaimed. “If there was some kind of fault on you, you’ve served your sentence for it completely. But anyway… Thank you.” 

It is natural to love your children, but it is a hundred, no, a thousand times more pleasant to realize that there’s something to respect them for. Respect is not granted as easily as parental love. 

I suddenly intercepted Elio’s glance with which he was watching Harry. I still didn’t forget my fit of jealousy, but I understood then - in that look, there were not even a tiny bit of the emotions he constantly gave me. No passionate tenderness in the morning, no admiration and friendly compassion at work, no desire at night, not a single one of dozens of other, true feelings that I felt on myself; there was only a warm glow of gratitude. 

According to my old teaching habit of not leaving anything unclear, I tasked myself with finding the answer to the question: who said that phrase about purgatory that Harry quoted? It was quite easy to find out; we used to watch this show on cable TV. This phrase was said by a half-man who spent many years fighting his own emotions. He was ashamed of simple human feelings and considered them to be a flaw; it took him to die and be resurrected to finally accept himself for what he was. And I mentally agreed with my son – my purgatory wasn’t any worse. 

The following day my sons asked us to show them Monet’s berm. We took them there, and by the smiles, by the way they lowered their voices, exchanging excited exclamations, we saw that the beauty of that place captured them. Harry, who was in love with space, would've loved the berm at midnight, when the line of the cliff is lost in the darkness, and it seems that you’re standing on the edge of the sky and can touch the stars with your hand; and I promised to myself that I would show it to him later. 

***** 

What else can I add? 

It is late August of 2005. I live and work on two continents; Elio’s working place is the whole world. Harry has been accepted in John Hopkins University; Josh will study in Milan, like he planned. 

All of us, I, Elio, Josh, and Harry, go our own ways, and our own stars shine for each of us. Harry’s stars are high in the sky, in an undiscovered country; Josh’s ones hold tightly to the ground; Elio’s float somewhere in between, like everything that has _the shape which shape had none_. Mine are of a rare green color and flash in the light hazelnut eyes. And as long as I can read the truth in those eyes, they will shine for me. How could I think, even for a second, that someone would be able to replace Elio for me?! If it wasn’t for him, I would have never known how it was to feel as if all beauty and harmony of the Universe, everything _che move il sole e l'altre stelle_ , is contained inside one man; if he hadn’t once shown me that it was possible, I would have died without knowing what it’s like to truly live. I wouldn’t have understood that “later” sometimes just has to give way to “now”. 

Neither he nor I can do without the villa, without the berm, without all this paradise, like Antaeus couldn’t do without his Mother Gaia. Therefore, we’ve spent this month here, mostly left to each other. Neighbors and colleagues visit us; we argue a lot, but the company of each other never bores us, just like one’s own heartbeat never does. 

We have each other, and there’s nothing else to say. I’m not Elio’s cage; he’s not my judge. Our friendship has matured and learned to do without patronage; our love learned to do without unnecessary fuss and mutual claims. 

Nevertheless, the fate had many more jokers up its sleeve. 

After another year, my three-year contract with Heidelberg University will expire. Perhaps I’ll extend it, I like it there; maybe I’ll move to Oxford, for example. But Elio is already pretty determined, as he puts it, not to leave me alone; therefore, he suggested that we shall live together. Saying that I was surprised would mean saying nothing. It’s been two years, but isn’t it premature to talk about it now? 

“In fact, it doesn’t matter to me where to live, and you’ll start smoking a lot if I don’t keep an eye on you,” he told in his defense. 

That’s even worse! I regretted bitterly not blanking out everything connected to medical issues from the manuscript. I didn’t want it at all to be treated like a sick man (or a man who would fall sick at any moment), and I didn’t want to chain Elio to me even more. 

“I don’t need an eye on me.” 

“Even at night?” Elio lowered his voice erotically. “What if you have nightmares?” 

He was teasing me, but in his eyes, I saw that this issue was a very serious one, and I didn’t play to his joking tone. 

“You must understand I don’t want to restrain your freedom.” 

Elio snorted. 

“Who’s a goose? Real freedom comes with the one you love. Only by this person’s side, you can be yourself. Telephone and mail are only _pis-aller_. 

“No objections here,” I thought, but still said: 

“You think it through. If you want, I’ll give you the word that I won’t smoke more than I do now.” 

We didn’t return to this subject for the rest of the day, and I decided that Elio actually changed his mind. But my belover suddenly cheated me: he just turned to my own children for support! That’s what I completely failed to foresee. After joint persuasion by this trio, even my hard-won independence started to crack. Actually, the thought of someone wanting to care about me is very uncommon, but I hope it won’t seem just as unbearable in the future. We’ll see. 

Of course, we won’t be able to do with an apartment now; we’ll have to rent or buy a house. Elio has a whole music studio in the basement of his Plymouth house, a piano, a synthesizer and countless specialized programs here; moreover, there is also something for that purpose in parents’ winter house. Perhaps I’ll sell my grandfather’s house. If I got the last will right, this heritage is not a fetish, but a material guarantee of my freedom. 

And here’s a paradox - the Christmas spirit returns to my life, little by little. Now I have something to hope for, something – and someone – to desire, something to believe in. 

Heaven gave me what I couldn’t even dream about. 

We must ask Elio what Heaven gave to him. But I think I know it anyway. This year, we have sat at _orle of paradise_ , as we used to, working or reading, but I’ve never seen him thoughtfully, questioningly glance up at our balcony. This glance, you know, as if he was waiting for someone invisible to look out from the window. Not a single time. 

THE END. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback is appreciated. Let me know how you think about this. Thank you for reading!


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